Advances in Literary Study, 2021, 9, 1-10

https://www.scirp.org/journal/als
ISSN Online: 2327-4050
ISSN Print: 2327-4034

Rereading a Classic Book for Young Adults:

The Representation of Death in Aidan
Chambers’ Dance on My Grave

Dimitrios Politis

Department of Educational Sciences and Early Childhood Education, University of Patras, Patras, Greece

How to cite this paper: Politis, D. (2021). Abstract

Rereading a Classic Book for Young Adults:
The Representation of Death in Aidan Although in 1982 Chambers’ book, Dance on My Grave, was considered bold,
Chambers’ Dance on My Grave. Advances rather provocative, today, almost forty years later we can only treat it as one
in Literary Study, 9, 1-10. of the classic daring books that still attracts and challenges modern readers,
https://doi.org/10.4236/als.2021.91001
teenagers and adults. And if the issue of homosexuality mainly identifies the
Received: December 10, 2020 novel nowadays seems commonplace, the matter of death stands virtually as a
Accepted: January 5, 2021 threatening scene throughout this book. However, the novel’s central hero
Published: January 8, 2021
named Hal Robinson, trying to clear his memories up, after he had expe-
Copyright © 2021 by author(s) and
rienced an adolescent love that still surpasses everything, entices all but poet-
Scientific Research Publishing Inc. ically his teenage friends-readers into a dance that exorcizes death and praises
This work is licensed under the Creative life. Following Hal in his pursuits, the present paper seeks, though not ex-
Commons Attribution International
haustively, to provide some more insights into Chambers’ novel concerning
License (CC BY 4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
the torturous search of the self as well as the depressing idea of inevitable
Open Access death that is very closely linked to the transgressions of adolescence.

Keywords
Adolescence, Aidan Chambers, Death, Identity, Homosexuality, YA Readers

1. Introduction
In Dance on My Grave1 we are introduced to death manifested both literally and
1
One of the most read books written by Chambers and second in the Aidan Chambers’ “Dance Se-
quence” (of six novels: Breaktime, Dance on My Grave, Now I Know, The Toll Bridge, Postcards
from No Man’s Land and This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn), Dance on My Grave was
first published in 1982. The book has been edited out several times to date, while it has been trans-
lated into many languages. In 2020 it also formed the basis of the film Summer of 85 (Été 85) di-
rected by French François Ozon. However, obviously due to its theme, the novel “was challenged at
the Montgomery County Memorial Library System in 2004 by the Library Patrons of Texas”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_on_My_Grave#cite_ref-9 accessed on 05/12/2020).

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D. Politis

metaphorically. The title of the book is itself both challenging and startling, since
we associate inescapably dancing with celebration. Death conversely is some-
thing to be dealt with, an unpleasant reminder of our mortality, we package off
our loved ones in a sorrowful ritual, a funeral dirge. Certainly, the English tradi-
tion of death is a somber, sorrowful affair. Dancing would be considered at best
inappropriate, more likely as offensive, and disrespectful.
Through reading the book we are forced to confront the issue of death2 on
many different levels. Literally through Barry Gorman’s death, subjectively through
Hal’s preoccupation with “death itself” and also metaphorically through the death
of self in the characters themselves. Hal examines the idea of death of self in his
description of the process of writing. “Making this Book of bits. This mosaic of a
me-that-was. This memorial to two dead people.” (Chambers, 1982: p. 5) Through-
out the book adolescence is presented as an inherently unstable state and as a
peculiar world which is “unable to participate fully in the broader adult and fa-
milial world” (Browne, 2020: pp. 5-7), a “period of carnival when the normal
rules of human behavior [...] are suspended” (Kokkola, 2013: p. 2), a dialectic
but torturous and disastrous process between identity, sexuality, and death
(Trites, 2000: p. 122).

2. Following Hal into His Memories, or When Death

Becomes a Painful Obsession
The novel is about a short love affair between two boys, Hal and Barry, in a sea-
side town in southern England. The idyll ends when the two teenagers fight over
a girl Barry has spent the night with, and Barry rushes off on his motorcycle to a
fatal crash. The book sets out all the details and facts of this relationship through
Hal’s memories and reflections.
The story opens with a news report, relating an event which has wounded the
public sense of decency. A boy, who we find later to be Hal, has been arrested after
performing “strange antics on the deceased boy’s grave”. The “antics” transpire to
be a dance more commonly viewed as being a celebration of life, but at the same
time a desire to avoid confronting the issue or idea of death as well as the fear of
the unknown, the untenability that creates this fear of facing up to death.
Hal, a sixteen year old boy, is the main protagonist in the story. He represents
the “dominant voice” of a first-person young narrator, “angry and rueful, articu-
late and witty, full of quotations and word-play, self-conscious, self-obsessed,
sex-obsessed, explicit and vivid, full of the facetiousness and stylistic fireworks of
intelligent adolescence” (Meek & Watson, 2003: p. 37). His lack of self-confidence
is manifested in his preoccupation with self and in his morbid fascination, his
neurosis about death. Death is his hobby, not dead bodies, but death itself. Hal
relates how he “caught” his interest in death as a disease, he relates the events of
the book as a kind of exorcism. Interestingly, it is the act of re-telling his expe-
2
The idea of death continues to occupy human beings of all time and ages. A very helpful as well as
a great resource for further reading concerning the issue of death and its multiple parameters is The
Oxford Book of Death edited by Dennis Joseph Enright (Oxford University Press, 1987).

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 D. Politis

riences that he feels changes him, not the experiences themselves. As he con-
fesses, “Because of writing the story, I am no longer now what I was when it all
happened. Writing this story is what has changed me; not having lived through
the story” (Chambers, 1982: p. 221).
As William Banks (2009: p. 35) asserts, many characters and especially the queer
ones, in young adult novels, “are most useful if they’re dead or gone”. Katelyn
Browne (2020: p. 1) observes that all these characters “have been closely connected
with death”, while Roberta Seelinger Trites (2000: p. 122) affirms that engaging
with death seems inevitable. Actually, the whole of Chambers’ book is consumed
by death. The language and symbolism are throughout echo mortality. Hal de-
scribes the people on the beach “[...] a morgue of sweating bodies laid out on slabs
of towels” (Chambers, 1982: p. 9), and Barry, at their first meeting, as “The Body”
(Chambers, 1982: p. 22). Hal commentates his own and the actions and objects
around him in terms of death. The bath at Mrs Gorman’s house he sees as a tomb,
a sarcophagus. He also contemplates the Egyptians faith in death through the
building of the pyramids and later relates old, cultural traditions of treating dead
people, traditions which seem repulsive and barbaric (Chambers, 1982: p. 200).
Hal’s interest in death is more than adolescent preoccupation; it is natural for
someone at the brink of adult life, experiencing for the first time the joy of au-
tonomy, of youth and beauty to be alarmed by the transience of this freedom.
Mortality is frightening as age appears to be devoid of possibility. Hal himself
views it as a ridiculous, sorrowful state. “‘My eyes will be palely vacant, staring
with gaga incomprehension at all and nothing while weeping from no other
sorrow than the blight of age. I will not be able to control my water; will spill my
food down my chest where it will leave festering fungoid spots on my holey car-
digan, and children will laugh at me in the street and call me unhappy names”
(Chambers, 1982: p. 102). Hal defines his own death fascination as lunatic, “if
your hobby is death, you must be mad”.
Hal’s interest in death whilst all-consuming is more academic than fatalistic.
Although he does contemplate suicide after Barry’s death, Hal is predominantly
concerned with staying alive evinced by his reaction to the capsize of the “Tum-
ble”, “I was not yet tired enough of life, I decided to wish for a trip to that certain
grave. Death I was interested in; being dead, I was not” (Chambers, 1982: p. 17).
Hal, however, courts death. In his obsessive search for a bosom friend, he meets
Harvey, a mad scientist with a precocious interest in experimenting with elec-
tricity. Harvey seems intent on blowing himself up.
Barry, the next contender for the boy with the can of magic beans, also has a
death wish—a wish that is realized whilst he is trying to reach the unattainable
speed just ahead. The drunk Barry and Hal stumble upon on their way back
from the cinema, is also intent on “shuffling off this mortal coil”,3 trying to dive
3
The phrase refers to the widely known and quoted “To be, or not to be”, the opening line of Prince Hamlet’s soliloquy/confession in William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). There are many illusions to Hamlet “shuffling off this mortal coil” in the book. Hal is in many ways Ham-
let’s foil, haunted by an oath to a dead man to carry out a deed he is reluctant to fulfil. The grappling with the corpse in the morgue echoes Ham-
lets grappling with Ophelia in her grave. Barry and Hal visit a production of Hamlet in London, afterwards Barry demands that Hal swears to
dance on his grave, if he should die first. This is paralleled by the ghost of Hamlets father’s demand that Hamlet give an oath of vengeance.

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D. Politis

into passing cars. In this particular scene Hal likens their actions to those of corpse
thieves trying to get the drunk to safety under the pier. Even Hal’s English teacher
and mentor Oz has a reputation for “eat(ing) new boys for breakfast”.
We learn through Hal’s composition entitled “Time Slip” something of his
death fascination. It is a fiction about a thirteen year old’s visit to a family gra-
veyard where he is suddenly struck with the realization of his own mortality and
of the continuance of time outside of his own existence. He examines the idea of
death. What is it? “Every one of these people must have been alive and must
have felt like me once. They were inside themselves, like I am inside myself now,
looking out of themselves... But then one day they weren’t inside themselves
anymore. They were dead... Is that what dead means? Not being in your body?
(Chambers, 1982: pp. 59-60).
This concern with the nature of death arises throughout the book as an in-
evitable but redemptive destination (Browne, 2020: pp. 3-4). Hal doesn’t view
death in any conventional religious sense. Indeed, he is dismissive of religious
tradition. Death he sees as the ultimate negation. It is life which confers personal
identity. In the farcical scene in the morgue Hal wishes for the corpse in front of
him to become Barry again. Failing this he desires to join death, to be in union with
Barry, forever in death. “To battle death in death. Enter that eternity with him. Be-
come by not being. Join in forever” (Chambers, 1982: p. 219). Death for Hal is
“the truth in negative”, it is existence without identity, and it is not being alive!
Hal and Barry have a caustic row over Kari. A mirror is shattered, as are Hal’s
illusions about his relationship with Barry. Hal runs out of the shop. “Fifty mi-
nutes later he was dead... An eyewitness said ‘It was like he was trying to fly. Just
took off. Unbelievable. Maybe he was drunk or stoned or something. Or just
plain crazy’” (Chambers, 1982: p. 180).
The actual death itself is not dramatized. We do not witness the event and the
facts are related through Hal and Mrs Gorman. Much of this is surmise and the
event is heavily subscribed with guilt and culpability. Barry’s death is unheroic as
he dies after crashing his motorbike. His death is not a grand statement, it is ar-
bitrary, meaningless, and it is the tragedy of the everyday and poignant in that
respect only. What actually is explored in the book is the effect of the death upon
the other characters.

3. Death as a Point of Departure, or Searching for the Self

Barry’s death is a vehicle for Hal’s self-realization. It is through Barry’s death
that Hal examines himself, his values and actions. It is the act of writing about
the feeling and experiences he felt in the 49 days he shared with Barry that Hal
arrives at some essential truths about himself and about life. In this Chambers
relies on Hal’s reading of Kurt Vonnegut, the idea that essentially “We are what
we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”.4 Hal extends
this idea to embrace the notion that we project onto bodies the characteristics
4
Vonnegut’s reflection serves as a motto in the first chapter of the book (Chambers, 1982: p. 8).

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 D. Politis

and personalities we desire to find there. This is not a new idea, the cliché “you
see what you want to see” is common enough. Nevertheless, it has like most
clichés lost much of its potency through excessive use. What Chamber’s succeeds
in doing is exploring this idea through Hal in a manner that re-energizes the
cliché. We are struck with the appalling nature of identity that we create the
“identities” of people around us by casting people in the roles and characters we
desire to see in the world that we create for ourselves. In the process of learning
part of Hal also, dies, his innocence and idealism. His desire to find the boy with
the can of magic beans. At the close of the book, Hal is content to be with Spike
as Spike, his search for a bosom friend, a Johnathan, is over.5
Hal’s epiphany, is in his realization that the world he creates and the charac-
ters he peoples that world with are not essentially real. It is a realization achieved
through writing about the death of his friend Barry. “I’m harder now. I think. I
hope. Maybe I am also more tolerant of a friend being what he is and not what I
want him to be” (Chambers, 1982: p. 114).
As Margaret Meek & Victor Watson (2003: p. 37) assert, Chambers’ novels,
specifically those of “Dance series”, “provide shifting perspectives upon young
adult anxiety and obsession”. Hal’s immediate reaction to Barry’s death is one of
pained disbelief. This quickly metamorphoses into guilt, catalyzed by Mrs Gor-
man’s accusation “My son is dead... and you killed him”. Hal’s world is turned
upside down. His recriminations, unexpressed anger and frustration manifest in a
physical breakdown. He is unable to communicate to his parents the enormity of
his grief, without explaining the truth of his relationship with Barry. His collapse is
effected by his inability to express his feeling, his remorse, well-illustrated in his
interview with his father.

- “Barry Gorman’s dead.

…After a while he said, taking it a bit hard aren’t you? I mean you haven’t
known him that long.
-Seven weeks”.
-Aye well, things like this happen. You can’t let them get you down”
(Chambers, 1982: p. 186).

Hal is isolated by his guilt. Spurned by his disbelief he races to the shop to see
if Barry is there. He finds everything neat, with no evidence of the quarrel and
pacifies himself with the idea that it was a nightmare. But facing the broken
mirrors empty frame he realizes that it is true. Hal is also struck with the realiza-
tion that he is alone, without identity, no reflection looks back from the shat-
tered mirror, he too in a sense, has ceased to exist.
Chambers explores the nature of personal identity throughout the book, via
the sexual and social instability of his protagonists, through their destabilizing
experiences (Trites, 2000: p. 54), as they try unconsciously or consciously to
5
The Biblical reference from I Samuel (18) is vital in understanding Hal’s need for the “boy with the
can of magic beans” his obsession. David and Johnathan found their love “passing the love of
woman”, whilst Hal’s stumbling upon this reference fuels his persistence to find a Johnathan.

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D. Politis

comply with “normality” (James, 2009: p. 27). Nevertheless, during this process
where there is interest even in the female presence, adolescents heroes failure “to
assert their agency and thus fulfill the desire to create an identity’” (James, 2009:
p. 65). It is worth noting here that Chambers, through the characters of Hal and
Barry, challenges the stereotyped homosexual. Both characters are masculine,
intelligent, attractive and physical. Thus, the search for the self comes to intensi-
fy an adolescent identity crisis (James, 2009: p. 127) and, finally, makes the ado-
lescent protagonists/readers to accept their own mortality (Trites, 2000: p. 119).
Symbolically, Hal changes after the capsize of the “Tumble”, Barry gives him
new clothes to wear, a new identity. Later Barry buys Hal clothes to wear, clothes
that Hal feels uncomfortable in but wears to please Barry. After Barry’s death,
once Hal has established and re-evaluated what went on during those 49 days, he
burns the clothes in an incinerator, he tries to purge himself of his borrowed
persona, and tries to retrieve his own self. Hal and Barry verbally assault one
another after Barry’s encounter with Kari. Ugly truths are laid bare. Hal de-
scribes it as “the saddest moment of all”. The shattering of the mirror by Hal is
also symbolic of the shattering of his assumed self, the cessation of the fantasy,
the crashing re-emergence of reality. “For a sharp split second I say my own face
snarling back at me before the pearly brickbat shattered the glass and my fact fell
in splinters on the floor” (Chambers, 1982: p. 180).
Hal re-examined the time he spent with Barry, while, wiser through reflection,
he realizes that things were not as he thought. It is a humbling painful awaken-
ing of consciousness to the truth that his understanding of their relationship was
based upon his desire for what that relationship should be, should mean. He de-
fines his relationship with Barry in terms of his obsession for a bosom friend.
Hal is blinded into seeing only a creature of his own desire, his own need. It is
only after Barry’s death that Hal faces up to the cruel realization that things were
not as they seemed, that Barry was not in reality “the boy with the can of magic
beans”. “But at the time... There was only one imperative: the two of us together.
I thought” (Chambers, 1982: p. 162).
It is not essentially Barry’s death that makes Hal so ill, but the retelling of the
experience. The events of the book are a symbolic journey of learning for Hal. At
the end of the journey Hal is wiser, more sober and in some ways more ordinary
than the idealist he was. Hal has undertaken the exposition of himself (thorough
writing) as a justification for his inexplicable behavior to the adult authority that
demands an explanation. Hal is coerced into a painful dissection of himself, his
motives and actions. He distances himself from his actions by writing in the third
person. And through writing about his actions, faces up to his obsession. The
theme of the book is Hal’s obsession, Barry’s death is merely a vehicle for this ex-
amination, the events through which Hal faces up to his own driving forces.
The physical manifestations of sickness that Hal experiences are indicative of
the painful awakening of consciousness that he is experiencing. Hal himself de-
scribes it as “a volcanic eruption of misery” (Chambers, 1982: p. 168). His misery

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is understandable, he has been left alone to face up to himself. Barry has be-
trayed his idea of friendship by precipitating this unwelcomed self-examination.
“My mother calls it a migraine. Maybe it is. But I know what I call it. Fright.
Funk. Shame. Guilt. Locked up anger trying to get out. Self-pity” (Chambers,
1982: p. 167).
Chambers uses Hal’s visit to the morgue to examine the nature of identity, the
disparity between what is and what seems to be. Hal dressed in the guise of a
lovesick girl, visits the morgue, requiring concrete proof that his lover is dead. It
is only because Hal reacts inappropriately to the sight of Barry’s body that the
travesty is realized, the scene moves from melodrama to farce as Hal’s disguise is
literally stripped away to the astonishment of the morgue attendant. This sym-
bolic uncovering is a major theme in the book. We witness it after the capsize of
the “Tumble” when Hal is forcibly stripped by Mrs. Gorman and later when Hal
visits Barry’s grave and literally attempts to uncover the body by attacking the
grave in a frenzy of grief. Chamber’s interest lies in the layers individuals apply
to distort truth, or to create a more palatable reality for themselves.
Hal is disturbed by his transformation and only goes through with the scenarios
because of his compulsion to see Barry once more. “I’ve got this compulsion. It’s
crazy, I know. But I’ve got to see him. I mean his body. I have to know for certain.
I can’t explain. I just have to, that all” (Chambers, 1982: p. 198). Hal feels that he
is surrendering his identity through his disguise. He feels vulnerable and exposed.
His ensuing de-frocking at the hands of the morgue attendant echoes Kurt Vonne-
gut. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”.
This warning of the peril of failing to be vigilant is dramatically enacted in the
morgue, Hal lets his guard slip and his identity is laid bare for all to see.
Hal is determined to carry out his oath to dance on his grave. For Hal this ac-
tion is necessary to appease his guilt, to acknowledge his friendship that was and
to affirm his new realized self, his aloneness. Hal feels that his sickness is attri-
buted to his failure to perform the dance. “I’m stuck with this till I’ve kept my
promise” (Chambers, 1982: p. 229). This haunting of an oath unfulfilled strongly
echoes Hamlet again. “I promised Barry, I said, to dance on his grave. He would
have danced on mine if I had died first, it was an oath” (Chambers, 1982: p. 225).
In essence Hal’s dance is a ritualistic casting off of Barry, a recognition of what
was, a releasing, a letting go. It is during the first dance that Hal acknowledges
his anger and grief, letting himself cry. Hal’s anger manifests in his hacking at
Barry’s grave. He is angry at being left alone, to confront reality alone. “Being
angry as well as sad, but not knowing why I was angry, made me even more up-
set. I started gasping for breath as the tears choked me...And in a frenzy began
hacking, stabbing, digging, using his lollipop number-stake as a spade, flinging
the soil aside in any direction” (Chambers, 1982: p. 235).
The violence of the dance is suggestive of the dramatic change that Hal has
undergone. He fulfils his oath through the dance but also more importantly he
mourns the death of his own self, his innocence, idealism and obsession. Ί had

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put to death and was being put to death. But there is no way of telling about the
tissue of death of my own self, or about the gangrene rotting away my dreams of
bosom palship” (Chambers, 1982: p. 191).
Hal manages to communicate to us an idea of how he is feeling as he journeys
through the events of the book. We are given an insight into his experiences, his
frustrations and pain. Hal employs an elevated vocabulary and is unashamed of
stating frankly how he feels. In the process of writing about his experiences Hal
continually comes across the limitation of language and through this his inability
to describe accurately or appropriately his experiences and feeling. The impossi-
bility Hal feels of conveying accurately his experiences into words, serves to
heighten the effect of what he does describe. We feel that what is stated about his
pain and anguish has failed to convey the intensity of the experience, due to the
practical constraints of the language.
The elusivity of language and meaning are closely mirrored by our under-
standing of death. Outside of religious tradition it remains an enigma. Through
the events of the book it appears senseless and arbitrary. Chambers does not
strive to make death more acceptable or meaningful. Whilst characters in the
book do hold religious beliefs, Chambers does not try to justify death as part of a
divine process a moving on to eternal life. It is the effect of death upon the living
that is explored. Chambers does not avoid examining the negative effect of
death, the painful loss, the hideous banality of it. All this is explored through
Hal. The novel is about the living and the effect of a characters death upon their
lives. Hal’s final dance is symbolic of his recognition of what had been and has
passed, it is also a celebration of his own life.
Chambers uses the theme of death to examine our human condition as John
M Manners writes, “The attitude of men to the death of their fellows is of unique
significance for an understanding of our human condition... The knowledge that
we must die gives us our perspective for living, our determination to live in such
a fashion that we transcend our tragic limitation” (quoted in Enright, 1983: p. 8).
Hal certainly is clearer about his own self and his own life after the events of the
book. Barry’s death is the catalyst for his examination of his life, his values and
needs. Indeed it is impossible in many ways for this to be otherwise. It is life that
helps us to form our thoughts about death and serves as a metaphor for death.
We are unable to talk about death without (also) talking about life. As death is
unknown, unexperienced, we must talk about the experienced, about life if we
are to speak convincingly and interestingly about death. It is through Hal’s ex-
amination of his life and feelings that we begin to understand Barry’s death. It is
from the hurt experienced by an adolescent muddled boy that we grasp an idea
of what death is.
Many of the characters in the book die a kind of death, whereas change is
viewed as a kind of dying. The figure of Hal’s mother is that of a pathetic shadow
of a former confident woman. She is meek, self-effacing, defined by her status as
a wife and mother, obsessed with cleanliness and with not upsetting her hus-

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 D. Politis

band. The ghostly woman has also died, her personal death of self is more dis-
turbing because she still exists, although spiritless. “If I think of her when I am
on my own, she’s like she was when I was little; laughing, busy, always on the go,
and talking all the time. But she isn’t like that now. Now she is a frightened
woman who hides [....]” (Chambers, 1982: p. 231). We witness her hiding from a
violent film on the television behind her book entitled Mrs. Pinkerton Came to
Die. In her exchanges with her son she is without opinion, indecisive, almost
without will. She presents a sad figure of a human being hiding from the world,
frightened of life.

4. As an Epilogue
Rereading Chambers’ novel in this paper, I actually decided to reflect own read-
ing, a past reading many years ago. Furthermore, of the many theoretical texts
that have dealt with YA Literature in the meantime—e.g. regarding the various
conceptualizations and research methodologies of adolescence (Trites, 2014; Ga-
vin, 2012), or the new directions in the study of Children’s and YA Literature
(Wolf, Coats, Enciso & Jenkins, 2011; Reynolds, 2007; Hunt, 2004; McCallum,
1999)—some have led me to enrich my present approach with a certain amount
of additional insights detected throughout Chambers’ novel.
Among the three preponderant discourses Roberta Seelinger Trites (2000: p.
122) distinguishes in YA novels—that is to say: identity, sexuality, and death—the
latter seems to be the most powerful in Dance on My Grave, as it essentially in-
cludes and unites the other two. As a result, the ongoing association between the
three does not surprise us at all as readers, while death through the search for
identity and sexuality appears almost expected. Besides, Chambers extends the
idea of death from the literal to the metaphoric.
Chambers employs a controversial and sensitive theme in choosing to ex-
amine death in his book. Faithful to his point of view that literature for non-adult
readers “at its best attempts to […] recreate and seek for meanings in human
experience” Chambers (2000: p. 42), he really explores areas of human expe-
rience that are ugly and unpleasant, areas we would perhaps rather not dwell
upon, in order to elucidate them, to re-interpret the old sense of things
(Rosenblatt, 1978: pp. 12-13, 107-108). Through Hal we witness a struggle with
obsession, possessiveness, jealously and death. Hal wrestles with despair and
with the problems of identity, reality and truth. The author through his prota-
gonist challenges our acceptance of traditional customs, encouraging us to ques-
tion whether Hal’s dance is essentially offensive or simply another type of ritual.
Hal’s ritualistic dance is viewed as a horrible desecration, a sacrilegious abomi-
nation because it is not commonplace or accepted behavior. Objectively, it is no
more absurd than accepted rituals of death.
Aidan Chambers in Dance on My Grave, albeit through death, triumphs in
challenging traditional gender definitions whilst presenting the reader with a
powerfully well written book. After reading the novel we are not left with any

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D. Politis

marvelous formula that will address the issues raised. What is achieved is a rais-
ing of our consciousness, an opportunity for the reader to dwell upon these areas
for themselves. In fact, every literary narration/incident, even that of death, as
“an event in time” in Rosenblatt (1978: p. 12) words, affects us not only when we
come together with the literary text but also after reading it, later, during our
real life as human beings.

Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

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DOI: 10.4236/als.2021.91001 10 Advances in Literary Study