Beside Schopenhauer's Corpse

“Beside Schopenhauer’s Corpse” is often labelled one of Maupassant’s “newspaper stories” that he indulged in between 1882 and 1887. The narrator meets a dying student of Schopenhauer’s who is reading the same book by his master over and over again. A haunting tale expressing the author’s own views on Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy. What is more, the reminiscences of the dying disciple often verge on the grotesque and carnal, viewing death as an ugly end, not a poetic final stop.