![]() However, I aim to explore how these characters function within stories, and thus the narrative purposes to which they are put. To be sure, representation could be understood here simply as the visual and aural symbols that constitute a character. This aspect matters because central to television representations are the ways in which these depictions are narrativized. ![]() That is, television’s ability to offer narratives across multiple episodes, or for programs to be made up of multiple episodes each with their own self-contained narratives, encourages forms of storytelling different from those media which typically are not episodic, such as film or literature. In particular, “the episodic nature of television remains an organizing principle” (McNutt 3) for its storytelling. In doing so, my article is attuned to the specificities of television, and therefore the kinds of stories that the medium is able-and likely-to tell. For many human cultures animals thus become a useful resource for displacing anxieties about mortality, enabling humans to acknowledge that which awaits us all while simultaneously refusing to face this fact directly.Ģ My essay explores this phenomenon through the analysis of an example from popular television. On the other hand, this denial allows humans to assert their superiority over other beings, founded on the assumption that only humans have a sense of their own impending deaths. Taking this further, Lori Marino and Michael Mountain postulate that humans’ “mortal anxiety and denial lead … to an increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the rest of the natural world” (6), as humans’ refusal to accept their own mortality discourages engagement with the fragility of the world. In this way, the animal is reduced to a vehicle through which an inescapable aspect of human existence can be simultaneously acknowledged and denied. Here, Burt suggests that human cultures employ representations of animal death as a way of engaging with their own mortality in order to avoid confronting this issue directly. After all, as Jonathan Burt argues, “It is difficult to avoid the presence of death … at all levels of inquiry into animal representation” (157). My article maintains that the representation of animal death in television is significant because it tells us something about both humans’ understanding of death and the use (symbolic and otherwise) of animals in contemporary American culture. ![]() 1 What kinds of stories does American television tell about the death of animals? How are such deaths represented, and in what kinds of television do they appear? How are audiences positioned in relation to those deaths, and therefore what responses are viewers encouraged to have? And what does the representation of animal death tell us about American culture more broadly, and its relationships with animals more specifically? This essay uses a single case study to unpack how these questions might be answered, as a starting-point for reflection on American culture’s use of animal death within the framework of storytelling in popular media. ![]()
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