Death (Discworld)
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| Characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series | |
| Character details | |
| Full name: | Death |
| Description: | The personification of death but with a more elaborate personality |
| Associations: | Azrael Mort Albert Susan Sto Helit |
| Location: | Death's Domain and everywhere else |
| Story appearances | |
| First seen: | The Colour of Magic |
| Also in: | Every Discworld novel except The Wee Free Men |
| Other details | |
| Notes: | Has also gone by the name "Bill Door" |
Death is one of the most popular Discworld characters, and makes an appearance in all but one of the Discworld books. His steed is a great white horse called Binky who is very much still alive. His hollow, peculiar voice is represented in the books by unquoted Small caps; it is peculiar because since he is a tall skeleton, he has no vocal cords to speak of, and thus, speaks through other means. In the first book, The Colour of Magic, all direct written references to Death are proper nouns, thus, for example, "he" is written as "He". This is usually reserved for the Discworld gods and is dropped after this novel.
Death is not invisible. Most people just refuse to acknowledge him for who he is, unless he insists. Under normal circumstances, only those of a magical disposition (e.g. witches and wizards), children and cats can see him, or allow themselves to see him.
It is also mentioned in The Colour of Magic that wizards and significant figures (e.g. kings) have the "privilege" of, when they die, being collected by Death himself, rather than one of the lesser entities. Most other deaths are collected by another functionary, but with the exception of Mort and Susan (both acting as "authorized" replacements for Death), there has only been one "collection" described in the books by anyone other than Death, attempted of Rincewind the Wizzard by the anthropomophic personification of Scrofula. However, Death himself must collect some souls in order to keep the momentum of death going, worked out by a system described as the 'nodes'. These nodes seem handily to be most of the characters who die in the course of the novels, as Death almost invariably turns up whenever any character dies, sometimes (especially when taking bad characters' lives) replaced by the Death of Rats, mentioned below in this article. As well as wizards and kings, he has shown up for numerous ordinary people, at least two dogs, and once for an incredibly small sea creature, possibly a tube worm. He has also appeared even in situations where characters might potentially die. These events are usually of importance within the story, so Death's appearance may simply be considered a plot device. Death mentions in Guards! Guards! that he does personally collect the souls of ordinary people Sometimes. On special occasions.
Personality
Death is efficient but not cruel, and sees his job as a necessary public service. His task is not to kill, but to collect.
He is fond of cats (who can see him at all times) and curry (although he doesn't need to eat). He lives (although he doesn't need to live anywhere) in an extradimensional realm called Death's Domain. Within the domain, his home (although he doesn't need a home) looks like a normal upper-middle-class house with a garden, is well-tended, but is predominantly black and decorated with a skull and crossbone motif. It is called Mon Repos, and is much, much bigger on the inside, because Death has not quite mastered the art of scale. Similarly, because he does not quite understand real distance compared to perspective, the surrounding terrain is actually relatively close, but blurred to appear farther away.
Death is fascinated by humanity, hence the above attempts at living beyond the role. This is also why he adopted an orphaned child named Ysabell (see below). When acting as a stand-in for the Hogfather he starts by greeting the children he meets in the course of his duties with Cower, brief mortals from force of habit, until reminded not to do so by Albert. Death's inability to interact comfortably with humans often seems to meet the definition of autism.
This fascination with humanity extends to the point of sympathy towards them, and he will often side with humans against greater threats (notably The Auditors). He has on a number of occasions bent the rules to allow a character extra life. Death has also indicated that he will oblige dying humans by playing a game with them for their lives (much like the personification of Death in The Seventh Seal), the games including chess (though he consistently has trouble remembering how the knights move) and a Discworld version of a popular board game (where someone lost despite having "three streets and all the utilities"). In one case, Granny Weatherwax was able to play cards against Death in a successful bid to save a child's life. In many ways, he is a character who epitomises the bleakness of human existence- in the book Reaper Man, in which he is rendered temporarily mortal, he becomes frustrated and infuriated with the unfair inevitability of death, a theme that continues through later books. In Soul Music he expresses misery at the fact that he is capable of preventing deaths, but is forbidden to do so. Terry Pratchett even says in The Art of Discworld that he has received a number of letters from terminally ill fans in which they hope that Death will resemble the Discworld incarnation.
Death has developed considerably since his first appearance in The Colour of Magic. In this, he was actually quite a malicious character. At one point he deliberately stops a character's heart. By the time of Mort he had gained the sympathetic and humorous personality that would make him so popular. In more recent novels, he has been used to examine recent developments in theoretical physics as, being a supernatural being, he is able to witness such events firsthand.
Death's gender
The initial books did not pronounce themselves about the gender of Death, giving an ambiguous "it". However, in Reaper Man, Death is unambiguously identified as a male. When asked to describe death, in the second Discworld computer game, the protagonist Rincewind hazards a guess, "Well, I suppose he's a man. You have to look at the pelvis, don't you?".
In the Spanish translations of the books, it was not possible to be ambiguous about Death's sex, because Spanish language must provide a grammatical gender to each object (table is female while pencil is male), sometimes even changing the gender of synonyms (computer can be ordenador (male), or computadora (female)). Thus, translator Cristina Macía chose the female gender for Death, as death in Spanish; muerte, is female. It had to be changed when Reaper Man was published, and justified in a footnote.
In the French translation, though the noun for death (la mort) is feminine, the actual gender when conjugating is masculine. The translator, Patrick Couton, justified the fact by a pun in a footnote : "La Mort est mâle, car c'est un mâle nécessaire" (Death is male because it is a necessary evil/male). In French : mâle = male and mal = evil are pronounced almost similarly.
Relations and associates
Death is both the servant and a part of The Old High One known as Azrael, the Death of Universes and ruler of all deaths.During Reaper Man Death was replaced by The Auditors, during which time a slew of new Deaths appeared to take up the slack. One of these, the Death of Rats, was allowed to remain in existence after Death's return (along with the Death of Fleas), filling a sidekick-like position. Death of Rats is usually accompanied by a talking raven named Quoth, who takes the role of Death of Rats's steed and says he's "in it for the eyeballs".
Ysabell, Death's adopted daughter, first appears in The Light Fantastic, and has a significant role in Mort. In this novel Mort is given the job of Death's apprentice, and he and Ysabell get married. Their child is Susan (below).
Death's granddaughter Susan is first tapped to fill in for him during the events of Soul Music, and is again called in Hogfather. She also plays an important role in Thief of Time. She would give it all up if it weren't for Binky, below.
Death's domain has a "groundskeeper" named Albert. He is not dead, but instead was brought to Death's domain when he performed the Rite of AshkEnte backwards. He entered the land of Death with around three months left before he was due to die. Subsequent trips to the Disc on errands for his master have left him with a mere five seconds.
Death frequently works with War, Pestilence and Famine, the other three Horsemen of the Apocralypse (though, when War, Pestilence and Famine gets their horses stolen in Sourcery, they rename themselves The One Horseman and The Three Pedestrians of the Apocralypse). Like him they have become more human than their roles require (Death himself explains this; in 'Thief of Time', he says that 'form defines function', implying that they are, in essence, 'human by extension'). In Thief of Time, Kaos, the Fifth Horseman, was introduced. However he left before they became famous and now works as a milkman.
Binky
Binky is Death's steed. He is a real horse; Death tried a skeletal steed, but kept having to stop and wire bits back on. Death also had a fiery steed, but that one repeatedly set his barn on fire.Binky is more intelligent than most horses and is a pure, milky white (it is noted in some novels that Binky is an exception to the usual equestrian rule of all pale-colored horses being officially 'grey'). He can fly, as well as travel through time and across dimensions, sometimes leaving glowing hoofprints in his wake, but is in all other respects a perfectly ordinary horse. He's well-treated, and loyal to his master and Susan when she's filling in for him. His shoes are made by Jason Ogg, the Lancrastian blacksmith of mythical skill, and he is probably immortal.
"My Little Binky" (a reference to My Little Pony) was a gift given to Susan Sto Helit, Death's granddaughter, for one of her early birthdays. Her parents returned the gift, fearing that this would make her a less "normal" child.
New Death
The new Death first appears in Reaper Man when he comes to collect the old Death, now known as "Bill Door". The new Death comes from human belief, but he is quite different from the original. Though he has the usual black robe, he is a larger figure than Bill Door and has only smoke underneath his robe, rather than bones. His horse, though, is the classic skeletal steed, as opposed to Binky. In place of a face or skull, the new Death wears a crown (in striking resemblance to the Witch-king of Angmar, who, only moments before his death, is also described as a figure robed in black with a crown hovering above the shoulders as if resting upon an invisible head). He is prideful and cruel; when he corners Bill Door, he mocks him and beats him instead of finishing the job.The new Death is destroyed when Miss Renata Flitworth comes to Bill Door's rescue by giving him some of her life, so that he can briefly escape "death". Bill Door then kills the new Death with the harvest scythe he used on the farm; just a humble garden tool, not the infinitely sharp implement of Death. Bill Door objected very strongly to the crown of the new Death, and his victory is the triumph of the compassionate "reaper man" over the tyrant who has no care for the harvest.
Death on screen
In both the 1996 animated adaptations of Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters, Death was voiced by Christopher Lee. In the upcoming Sky One adaption of Hogfather he is to be voiced by Ian Richardson.See also
| The Discworld | |
|---|---|
| Characters: | Albert - Angua - Carrot Ironfoundersson - Cohen the Barbarian - Fred Colon - Death - Detritus - Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler - Gaspode - Greebo - Igor - Bloody Stupid Johnson - Leonard of Quirm - The Librarian - Lu-Tze - The Luggage - Mort - C.W.St J. Nobbs - Susan Sto Helit - Rincewind - Twoflower - Havelock Vetinari - Samuel Vimes - The Witches - Ysabell - Discworld gods - more... |
| Locations: | Ankh-Morpork - Agatean Empire - Borogravia - Death's Domain - Dungeon Dimensions - Ephebe - Genua - Klatch - Lancre - Muntab - Quirm - Sto Lat - Überwald - Unseen University - XXXX - more... |
| Other: | Calendar - City Watch - Clacks - Guilds - Magic - Post Office - Stealth Chess - Minor Discworld concepts |
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