Edmond Dantès has stopped counting the days. Now he stops eating.

In this excruciating chapter, Dantès follows through on his plan to die. He doesn’t leap into it—he starves with full awareness, slowly and deliberately. At first defiant, then mournful, his hunger becomes a battle between his oath and his instinct to survive. Dumas crafts a haunting portrait of the body’s betrayal and the mind’s desperation: the meat begins to look appealing, the prison less grim. But Dantès clings to the only control he has left—refusal. And as his senses dim and lights dance behind his eyes, we enter with him into what Dumas calls “the twilight of that mysterious country called Death.”

Topics Covered:

•Starvation as willful protest and final autonomy

•The psychological seesaw between despair and hope

•Dumas’ metaphorical use of will-o’-the-wisps and Tantalus

•How time dissolves under extreme mental duress

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