A Beautiful Death: Visual Representation in Death With Dignity Storytelling

This dissertation takes as its central topic visual narratives in Death with Dignity Storytelling and posits the author's ideas of a beautiful death and the heard gaze. Its methodology includes a textual analysis of such images, which in turn leads to a typology, and the use of a digital tool to "sum images" to test the veracity of the typology. What creates the impulse to look at images of pain, suffering the withering body, the compulsion to bear witness to misery? That question is in part answered by Sontag (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others---"we are spectators of calamities" (p. 18)---and is evident in the indefinite pronoun that hangs at the end of the slim volume's title. Because it is in those others, that we see ourselves. A Beautiful Death: Visual Representation in Death With Dignity Storytelling considers two case studies as examination and proofs of its claims.