Likewise, narratives commonly defin

Likewise, narratives commonly define bodies as the seat of consciousness. Stephen Dedalus’s childhood body, for example, leaves impressions on his mind that will shape his later ways of thinking, so that the water images from childhood of wetting the bed or of being pushed into a ditch later produce an antipathy toward bathing. How narratives develop this distinction between bodies and nonbodies will depend not only on the culture out of which they arise but also on the role bodies will play in a narrative. In contrast to the importance given a dead body in a play like Sophocles’s Antigone—where a dead body continues to be a body endowed with cultural and familial significance—we might note the complete lack of interest in such bodies in most contemporary popular action films and adventure stories, where the bodies of the dead antagonists are rarely accorded significant attention. In these narratives bodies are meaningful primarily because they participate in the drama of danger and chase. Once the characters are dead, their bodies are inanimate and thus, narratively at least, no longer bodies at all.