Significance of death as a literary tool in theatre

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Significance of death as a literary tool in theatre
Thesis Statement: Different playwrights in their works deliberately decide to employ death of a character or characters to drive a point across.
During the Shakespearian era, plays in which the main character or protagonist get to face death were termed as tragedies. Such plays often left the audience in suspense often provoking their minds to wonder how things would have played out had the main character lived on. In later plays, the importance of death as a literary tool grew immensely because of the historically significant events that were taking place. In the case of latter playwrights, death was not being used to signify the terminality of matters. The playwrights do this by showing how the different characters interact with death. It was being used at times to allude to the transition that the author was witnessing or experiencing during his day and age. I shall analyze the plays one by one illustrating the significance of death in each of the plays.
In the novel titled "Notes from the underground" death is used by the author to put a point across. The main character in this novel is an anonymous narrator who critics later came to call the "underground man". It is divided into two parts. In the first one, the underground man narrates his inner thoughts on humans and their belief that everything that happens must have a particular cause. This concept is known as determinism. From his ramblings, the audience gets the feeling that the narrator exhibits signs of insecurity because of his own circumstances. He cannot achieve happiness because of his spitefulness towards life. This however does not stop him from desiring to be happy.
The second part of the novel has a conventional story has three sub-plots in it. The most outstanding being the story of Liza, a young prostitute from whom the underground man solicits and later gets sexual favors. While they are lying together in a dark location, he decides to offer her a glimpse of her future. He does so by predicting to her that her beauty will deteriorate over time until she no longer becomes desirable.
When she thinks of it she gets an epiphany that involves her dying a miserable woman. This marks an important turning point for her because she is made aware of the ills she exposes herself to on a daily basis. This inspires her so much to the point that she decides to visit him at home. At first he tries to dismiss the whole situation by giving her a lethal dose of criticism. While he is doing this, he loses his composure and cries. It emerges that the things he was telling her were actually based on what he felt about himself and the dire situation in which his life was. It was him, the underground man, who feared dying a miserable death because of his poverty. In the first part, he mentions that people will talk about the pain they have in a bid to spr...