John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851

"She did not have the leisure or the knowledge to be fearful. She just felt -- for a tumbling instant -- like she'd often felt at night, half conscious in the falling shudders of a dream. Winded, weightless and betrayed. Hear heard collided with her ribs. Her body shook and arched. Her head was loose and hurtling through rimless chambers. Some conjuror had vaporized the earth and emblazoned all the space through which she fell with pixilated, pulsing lights. Her final moments were kinetic, abstract, pointillist."--Jim Crace, Being Dead.

Millais's Ophelia depicts Ophelia, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, floating in a river just before she drowns and meets her demise. Ophelia's face symbolically reflects her quickening transition from life to death, as her eye lids seem to be on the verge of closing. She is surrounded by a pitch-black pool that seems to be draining the life out of her. In addition, the painting's representation of her body position shows a sinking movement. Her waist seems to be pulling her down under water while her hands drifting right above the water with curled fingers, exhibit a drowning sensation. It seems as though death itself is sucking Ophelia into its grasp--a bottomless pit of despair.

While Millais's painting of Ophelia shows a girl in despair, it also showcases a type of romanticism of her situation. Though the black water is murky and sinister, the dying Ophelia is depicted rather beautifully through her facial features, dress, and flowers floating around her. In addition, her arms are spread out and her facial expression is strangely provocative. Just like Ophelia, Celice from Being Dead is quickly approaching her end. The narration shows rapid progression from the state of consciousness to death. In addition, Celice's physical positions while dying (her head being loose and her body arched) show her vulnerability and weakness in the face of death, just as death sucks Ophelia into the water. Neither ever had a chance and both only committed the "crime" of love. The last main similarity between Ophelia's situation and Celice's situation is that both are victims of nature. Ophelia's body is surrounded on all sides by plants, grass, and other forms of nature which prevent her escape, the same way that Crace's novel expresses the nihilist concept that life is a product of nature and will end in nature's hands with no real purpose.