In his manifesto ‘El concepto de la nueva literatura’ of 1909, Ramón Gómez de la Serna defined the vitalist principles that would guide much of his early work. There was no doubt in his mind that the energetic, bodily self, brimming with vitality and keyed to its senses and most intimate passions could propel a new aesthetics of life. ‘La primera influencia de la literatura es la vida’ (‘The first influence of literature is life’), he proposed, adding: ‘Hay que estudiar el intervencionismo de la vida’ (‘The interventionism of life must be studied’) (151). He concluded by stating simply: ‘La labor de la nueva literatura por esto, ha de ser la de irnos reconstruyendo’ (‘The task of the new literature, therefore, must be our self-reconstruction’) (157). There is, however, a crucial facet of his thinking during this early formative period that remains largely uncharted and lends further insight into his aesthetic sense of life: his preoccupation with death. Given his vitalist optimism and calls for action throughout his work between 1909 and 1914, it is tempting to regard his early considerations of mortality as marginal reflections, with little bearing on his work. Yet the truth is that he was keenly interested from the beginning in a wide range of existential and cultural conceptions of death.

It should come as no surprise that as Gómez de la Serna was defining the fundamental vitalist assumptions underlying his work, he felt compelled to explore the mystery of death. As critics have long pointed out, death in its various expressions is a mainstay of Gómez de la Serna's fiction. Yet his preoccupation with death extends well beyond his fiction and constitutes one of the core thematic threads running throughout his oeuvre. The topic of death can be traced to his boyhood journal El Postal of 1901 in which he wrote a brief article – a type of reportaje – detailing a crime in Fuencarral, Madrid.