Political, Moral, and Existential Nihilism in Wilfred Owen’s Poem “The Dead-Beat”

Abstract

This paper analyzes “The Dead-Beat”, a war poem by Wilfred Owen, from the perspective of nihilism, or its three specific kinds (political, moral, and existential nihilism), as Alan Pratt, a theoretician and researcher of nihilistic philosophy, categorized this notion. According to Pratt, political nihilism refers to the idea that current political structures are false, moral nihilism means that good and evil are relative categories, whereas existential nihilism means that human life is intrinsically devoid of any higher (teleological) purpose, and as such not worth living. Through the misfortunate demise of “The Dead-Beat’s” protagonist on the WW1 Western Front, the poet advocates all three kinds of nihilism, for, as the paper argues, the poem’s tragic hero does not die of a wound but as a result of his revelation that the existence of an individual human being or soldier, especially if trapped in the trenches of history’s first mechanized war and abandoned by both his state leadership and his closest kin, is meaningless (and it is precisely in this fact that the presence of political, moral, and existential nihilism lies). This paper views “The Dead-Beat’s” nihilism in contrast with the ideology of materialistic progressivism as propounded by both positivist philosophers and liberal theologians of the nineteenth century. Apart from dealing with the tragic hero’s mental derangement as the cause of his death, I also stress irony as a particular quality of “The Dead-Beat” and also of Owen’s complete poetic war opus.