Grief and Its Displacement through Fantasy in Michael Ende's The Neverending Story

Grief and Its Displacement through Fantasy in Michael Ende's The Neverending Story by Hamida Bosmajian "Children encounter death directly or indirectly in a great variety of ways ... and they learn not to ask any questions about death," notes Ingun Spiecker-Verscharen (SpieckerVerscharen 6). Death's absoluteness becomes a phantasm in out lives against whose encroachment we thrust the fragile bulwark of our personal and collective fantasies. Two defense-fantasies against death work already for the pre-school child: the primary fantasy of our personal and special exclusiveness from mortality and the fantasy of the ultimate rescuer. In a death-wish fantasy, the ego imagines the escape from its boundaries into an ecstatic swoosh of cosmic energy or a gentle melting into nothingness. Somehow the ego manages to remain the conscious watcher of this dissolution! All three fantasies shape plot, characterization and images in Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. Ende's story about Bastian Balthazar Bux's journey as the ultimate rescuer of the magic realm of Fantástica is a quest romance through which this ten to twelve year old externalizes and works through his experience of grief and loss. After Bastian' s mother dies, his grieving father isolates himself to such an extent that communication with Bastian virtually ceases. Many children experience such a double bereavement that surrounds death with the taboo of an awesome mysterious silence that inhibits the child's questions, though the child may already have accepted the death of the beloved person with that stark matterof -factness adults attribute to lack of feeling. Spiecker-Verscharen points out that "The less daily life changes, the better. Children must be granted a view towards the future and it must be made clear to them that the condition of grief is distressing but temporary" (27). Deprived of such a structured and healing environment, Bastian is thrown upon his own resources, but is well aware of what is amiss in his life as he defines his situation to Mr. Coreander the antique bookstore owner: '. . . Father doesn't say anything. He never says anything. It's all the save to him.' 'And your mother?' 'She's—she's gone.' 'Your parents are divorced?' 'No,' said Bastian. 'She's dead' (Ende 8-9). Like a divine intervention, the telephone rings at this moment and, while Mr. Coreander answers it, Bastian steals the book The Neverending Story, hides himself in the school house attic and engages in so intense and total an act of reading that he will go "through the text," enter Fantástica and experience there the ambiguities and complexities of his own story. As one of humanity's most powerful coping systems, fantasies are by no means unambiguous in their value for personal maturation. They do relate us meaningfully to the internal and external world, they prepare us for the future and enable us to come to terms with the past and present, they let us imagine our own death and the death of others. But fantasies also crystalize and stereotype feelings, persons and experiences can be obstacles when the biological or psychological survival of the organism is at stake. The diversionary tactic of fantasy in The Neverending Story avoids a blank through what Ernest Becker has called "the denial of death." Bastian's denial goes like this: If I can tell father a story that will make him forget mother's death, then he will give me the love and attention I so desperately need. To reach his goal Bastian gets lost to the father for a day and a night, thereby motivating the father to emerge so that Bastian can tell his tale. But for readers young and old The Neverending Story suggests and confirms our cultural patterns of the denial of death. Bastian's mother died during an operation in an impersonal city hospital: He and his father had sat for hours outside the waiting room. Doctors and nurses hurried this way and that. When his father asked about his wife, the answers were always evasive. Finally a bald-headed man in a white smock had come out to them. ... He pressed their hands and mumbled something about "heartfelt sympathy"! 120 After that everything...