I have thought of this book (and I thought of the original lectures) as telling an optimistic story, but I do see that appearances are against me. It may have seemed that after the bleakness and violence of my Kafka chapter there was nowhere to go but up. Yet a certain gloomy consistency remains among my topics, even when I'm evoking splendid literary instances. Death, suffering, unemployment and hell in my previous chapter; waste and loss in this one; and Nietzsche's madness in the next. I persist in believing the story is not all bad, but obviously I'm going to have to work at persuading my readers.

It's true that thoughts of the dead have been in my mind as I have been writing, and especially of the people named in my dedication: F. W. Dupee because of his work on James and his lessons in irony, J. P. Stern because of his writing on Kafka and my memories of Cambridge, Edward Said because of his recent departure and our closeness in age and other things, and my father because of the constant example he didn't even know he was giving. But thoughts of the dead are not thoughts of death, and once we have made room for the necessary sorrow, it is possible to see how urgently such memories and models invite us to continue in their train.