About the Dying of the Body and the Dying of the Spirit: “How I Didn’t Kill My Father and How Much I Regret It” by Mateusz Pakuła

Abstract

The study focuses on the problem of corporeality and spirituality in relation to Mateusz Pakuła’s prose debut How I Didn’t Kill My Father and How Much I Regret It. The author of the article presents the analysed work against the background of the contemporary funeral tradition and makes genre determinations in an attempt to show the specificity of Pakuła’s literary expression. He shows the drama of a father and a son presented in the funeral diary, pointing on the one hand to the dying of the body (father), and on the other to the deep spiritual crisis of both protagonists (father, son). In the case of the father, it concerns the inability to bear his own pain and a request for euthanasia, and in the case of the son, it is a drama of choice, i.e. accelerating the death of the father or passivity and accompanying his father in a painful and long dying.