Blue At all times people have been curious about whether there is a life after death. Nobody knows exactly what happens after you die. We can only guess making up stories and building theories. Tim Pears’ story “Blue” describes the events of three days after Joseph Howard’s death. The narration is unusual. The author uses a limited omniscient narrator. The main character of the story, Joseph Howard, is an observer. “He knew he’d died at three o’clock in the afternoon of Wednesday, July the 27th, 1988, the moment he woke up in the room that he’d come to hate”. Here we also get to know how the disease began to attack his body. He was declining in the starched sheets of his bed. He gradually lost his huge appetite, he lost weight turning into “a skinny wraith whose ribs where showing for the first time in 50 years”. The pain moved around his body “like a poacher in the night searching for a vulnerable deer in the pinewoods”. It had first attacked him in his heel, then in the neck, back… The pain was what had wrecked him cause he always thought he was impervious to pain. He knew it was a lung cancer, “since he’d smoked 40 untipped cigarettes a day since the age of 15”. Now the only way to get rid of this increasing pain was using drugs and putting himself in the world with no sensation, with no sense. The next day his doctor, Dr. Buckle, paid him a visit checking his condition and stating it was an impressive respite of disease. So Joseph went to the garden just wandering and poking about the sheds. He saw a magpie and an inverted, topsy-turvy, ladybird with red dots on a black shell. He remembered everything his daughter was doing for him during the months of his miserable decline and that his recovery must have meant a great easing of her burden. Suddenly he had got an appetite and ate several sandwiches. Everything takes him back to the past. The forth part begins with Joseph walking into the village. He was thinking of his wife realizing that he was thinking less of her than of himself. There was no soul around. It seemed to him that he saw a child running, but he wasn’t sure. He felt the drops of the rain, but the sky was clear. The world was silent and empty. “He knew he’d died 3 days earlier at 3 o’clock in the afternoon”, so he cried. The church bell made him walk into a graveyard. He saw a Rector but he couldn’t hear him… and then he heard soil scattering across the lid of the coffin… his coffin. Now he saw his friends, family and for the first time since his death Joseph felt a sudden upsurge of anger. “Volcanic anger”. He doesn’t want to be dead. Now when he found out whether it was life after death, he didn’t want it any more. He realized how many precious to his heart things he lost forever. The only thing he wishes that he could have been shown this new world before he died.