"The Little Death" starts with a man climbing up a tree. It begins, "He had never felt that sense of having been there before so strongly: climbing up the ladder to the platform, he knew perfectly well that the top rungs would be scaly and harsh, and that there would be a box, a dark green box on top of it.

"There was no box." (p.51)

He gets up to the platform and looks around. Again it's repeated that "there was no box". He goes to "the edge of the unrailed platform, and, repressing a first hint of vertigo (the platform was in gentle motion), he looked over the edge to the shadows, where the keeper still stood, the white of his upturned face showing far below: forty feet, or was it sixty?" (p.51) The keeper calls up to him: "Mr. Grattan," he calls (and thus we learn the man's name). "The horse is under the far side" (p.52) Grattan does not understand the terminology, though he soon realizes it refers to a trestle to sit on. The keeper next tells Grattan that the pigeons usually come in from the right. Then the keeper departs.

Left to himself, Grattan reflects on "that feeling of being at one remove from life ... It was something like one of the stages of drunkenness when a man seems to stand a little to one side of himself, listening to what he says and watching him, but without a great deal of interest." (p.52). Grattan had "an inner life of far greater reality than that which went on around him ... [which] was a kind of awareness and withdrawal to another plane of existence." He had first experienced it as "a boy walking along the tow-path on a summer's evening in the shadows of the heavy, dusty green of the trees, twenty years ago, always there had been something of anticipation in it ... a sense of growing, inevitable crisis." He "awaited" this crisis "calmly"; "it was at once desirable and terrible" (p.53)

Grattan thinks back as well to his life "at his common level". (p.53). He was currently hunting at an estate called Langton ("a very grand place indeed, quite the grandest in a country full of big estates" (p.53))., owned by a Mr. Clifton, near his boyhood home. Grattan had been a friend of young Clifton, who was killed in the war, during the war, and possibly in childhood. Grattan's uncle and three aunts ("dear, kind people: he had lived with them in their celibate house nearly all his life" (pp. 53-54)) "had approved his first boyish acquaintance with the children of the local magnates. 'So suitable,' they said to one another". (p.54) The wartime friendship led to the offer to go hunting, and will possibly also lead to "some as yet undefined employment with the old agent" (p.54)

As Grattan lets birds land all around him without shooting at them, he thinks back to "an unending floor of white cloud, and in the sky was an aeroplane falling and falling, falling forever." (p.55) It was a German plane and the German pilot does not bail out; he falls from Grattan's sight, presumably to his death, and Grattan says aloud, "While I live I shall never kill another living thing." (p.55) He experienced a feeling of deja vu at that time as well.

He fires his rifle "down into the dark shadows", though not at the birds all around him, "Then he fired another two barrels ... That should do for the keeper, he said." (p.56) Then the story ends as follows:

"Again the quiet came back, the curtain dropped fast, and now his mind was glowing with active suspense: it even invaded his body: his heart beat and his stomach was constrained just as it had been with him and he a young boy in his first love. Now it was here, here and coming on him.

"He stood up slowly, with his gun hanging open in his right hand and his left hand wavering to his lips.

"But it did not come. There was only the soft wind and the far off voice of old Mr. Clifton: 'Grattan, we're going along now.' The words drawn out, calling to carry, and the lights and the gentle whine of the car, that died to a throb.

"He made no reply, but turned in the darkness." (p.56)

Charlezzzz and Anthony have already made excellent postings on this story. I want to add a few thoughts to their comments.

Charlezzzz noted that the dark green box that wasn't there at the story's beginning may stand for a coffin (i.e., death) and green a symbol of the resurrection. I see two other possible significances to the color green: first, Grattan had first experienced the feeling of being separated from himself "in the shadows of the heavy, dusty green of the trees", so this separation may also be connected to the box (death), Second, green is of course associated with Ireland. The story has some similarities to the popular song "God Save Ireland" (written by Timothy Daniel Sullivan), where the "noble hearted three" climb the gallows tree to their doom:

Climbed they up the rugged stair; rung their voices out in prayer;
Then, with England's fatal cord around them cast,
Close beneath the gallows tree, kissed like brothers lovingly,
True to home and faith and freedom to the last.

The story is even more similar to William Butler Yeats's poem "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death", with the clouds, the premonition, the acceptance of a coming fate, etc. Here is Yeats's poem:

I KNOW that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My county is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

(Yeats's poem is about Major Robert Gregory, killed in World War I.)

Then there's a third piece of writing the story resembles, a famous passage from The Great Gatsby, which also begins with a man climbing a ladder and ends with (a second man in this case) standing, struggling mentally, his lips agape:

"Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees -- he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishible breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

"... For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 112)

Here I think we're begining to see a bit of the meaning of the story's title. As Charlezzzz pointed out, the little death (la petite mort -- by the way, should this be la petite morte? or perhaps le petit mort?), as a French expression, has a sexual meaning. O'Brian, as a professional French translator, is hardly likely to have been ignorant of this meaning. Yet "The Little Death" has hardly any hint of sexuality (unless one wants to give a strained Freudian interpretation to the trees, the guns, etc.). There's a mention of the household of his aunts and uncles as "celibate", which isn't much, and then there's one more mention, which is so small as to scarcely be noticeable, but which is, I think, the key to the whole story.

At the end of the story, when the feeling of being outside of himself and impending crisis (which for convenience I'm going to refer to simply as "the feeling") is coming on him, it says, "his heart beat and his stomach was constrained just as it had been with him and he a young boy in his first love". There is thus an identification of the feeling with love. Further, recall that it was as a boy that he first felt the feeling, so that the feeling and the first stirrings of love began at the same time. Finally, recall that his aunts and uncle "approved his first boyish acquaintance with the children of the local magnates". Note that children is plural, so it could not have been just young Clifton that Grattan was acquainted with. There was at least one other, perhaps a young Miss Clifton, and Grattan's acquaintance, and his first love, and the feeling, all began and grew together.

Now look at what's happening with the feeling: Grattan's identity is in crisis; it is changing, perhaps separating from itself. I mentioned in my posting on "Not Liking to Pass the Road Again", how changing, self-created identities is common with several characters in O'Brian: in its most extreme form, Richard Temple creates a completely different persona, pseudo-Temple, as he calls it. Gatsby has his own self-created identity, but it changes and is transformed when thoughts and dreams of Daisy enter into it. Thus we see love leading to a transformation of self-identity. To toss in yet another reference, the best expression I know of this concept is in the song "Fairy Tale of New York", written by Shane MacGowan (at the time, lead singer of the the Irish punk band The Pogues). It's sung as a duet between a man (MacGowan) and a woman (Kirsty MacColl):

He: I could 'a been someone.
She:Well, so could anyone,
Ya took ma dreams from me,
When I first found you.
He: I kept 'em with me, babe,
I put 'em with my own,
Can't make it all alone,
I built my dreams around you.

So where is the death in the story's title? To answer that, let's look at O'Brian's novel, The Catalans. Xavier is speaking: "I will tell you what I mean by the death of the soul. When you no longer have the power to love, when there is no stir of affection anywhere in your being, then your soul is dead. That is the death of your soul. Your soul is dead, and you are damned: you are dead walking, and you are in hell in your own body." (p.96)

So let's look again at what's happening in the story: Grattan has been experiencing a change, a transformation and separation of identity, that was associated with his boyhood love, and this change has been building up over the years, until now, at last, it is building to a head, but rather than being transformed like Gatsby, the change does not come, because its fuel, his feelings of love, are gone. Rather than the birth of a new identity, he has experienced a death of the soul.

Here's a few further thoughts on the story:

Still on the subject of identity, it's interesting to note the characters that act as stand-ins for others. Old Mr. Clifton no doubt sees Grattan as a substitute for young Clifton. Grattan sees the German he shot down as a substitute for young Clifton, and the birds he will not shoot as substitutes for the German. Not to say that these characters are fooled, just that they are looking at one person and seeing another at the same time.

Grattan's determination that, "While I live I shall never kill another living thing" is similar to Stephen Maturin's determination to forswear killing in Master and Commander. Remember Stephen does not take part in the assault on the ship, although he does steer the Sophie. (Though we know how well Stephen lives up to this determination in the later novels.)

Grattan's name is the same as a famous 18th Century Irish parliamentary man, who supported reform and Catholic emancipation, but not violence, and certainly not the '98 rising. The historical Grattan's sympathies seem to have been in line with Stephen's.

The scene at the beginning, where Grattan is forty or sixty feet high, and he represses a touch of vertigo as the platform sways, is reminiscent of many of O'Brian's nautical characters when they climb the mastheads.

Finally, there's the very interesting character of the keeper. The name is the same as that of the menacing keeper of the hoard at the end of "The Happy Despatch"; but whereas the earlier keeper stood in Woolen's way, barring him from escaping up the mountain, Grattan has gotten by his keeper. Grattan is above the keeper and looks down on his white face (a white face, like a skull's, reminiscent of Scott's suggestion during the "Happy Despatch" discussion that the earlier keeper = death. Interestingly, Daisy's face in the passage quoted above is also white, and, while I'm on the subject of colors in The Great Gatsby, the famous green light at the end of Daisy's dock gives yet another possible significance to the green box at the beginning of "Little Death", but I digress...). And then there's the interesting treatment of the keeper at the end of "Little Death". Grattan fires his rifle twice into the dark shadows and says, "That should do for the keeper." The apparent meaning is that Grattan has wasted his shots, but the keeper will hear the sounds and conclude that Grattan is at least trying to shoot at the birds. But there is a bit of ambiguity there. Perhaps instead of shooting for the benefit of the keeper, Grattan is shooting AT the keeper. That would REALLY do for the keeper.

John Finneran