My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

Everyone’s life contained a horizon, the horizon of death, and it lay somewhere between the second and third generations before us, and the second and third generations after us. We, and those we lived with and loved, existed between those two lines. Outside were the others, the dead and the unborn. There, life was a chasm without us. That was why a figure like Hamlet could be so important. He was a work of fiction, someone had made him up, given him thoughts and actions and a space in which to act, but the point was that fiction was no longer a valid dividing line, a valid distinction, the moment one stepped beyond the horizon of death. Hamlet was neither more nor less living than the historical figures who had once occupied the earth; in a certain sense anyone from then was fictional. Or, since Hamlet was made of words and ideas, the others of flesh and bone, was it only he and his life form that could overcome time and mortality?

Horizon of death great analysis of Hamlet