Necro-Eco: The Ecology of Death in Jim Crace’s Being Dead

This essay reads the decomposition of the human corpse in Jim Crace’s novel Being Dead as an expression of active, vital, agential, and transformative inter-species interaction. Affirming the creative possibilities of putrefaction, my analysis of Crace’s necro-ecological narrative emphasizes the vitality of death through the entangled interactions of organisms both human and non-human, living and dead.