The Last Words before Death

Jacek Leociak

Abstract

The author analyses the last words uttered by criminals sentenced to death (and registered in court documents) as well as those of victims of anti-American terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the massacre committed on 22 July 2011 by Anders Breivik on Utøya island (sources included registered last telephone conversations from the World Trade Center and the United Airlines Flight 93 and 175 as well as last SMS texts from Utøya). The last words of the condemned could be included in four topoi, the first being: “I am ready/prepared”; the second – “turn to Jesus/God”; the third – “I love you”, and the fourth – “we shall meet soon”. The recorded vocal and text testimonies of the victims of 11 September 2001 and the massacre on Utøya (22 July 2011) echo one of the topoi present in the last words of the condemned before an execution. I have in mind the conveyance of confessions of love to those nearest and dearest: I love you – these last words spoken before death (both by the condemned, the victims of terrorists, or those on their deathbeds) – constitute a distinctive genre of speech not described by Anna Wierzbicka in her book: English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary (1987). This is not the time for proposing semantic paraphrases maintained in Wierzbicka‘s style, but I would like to uphold the genre intuition. The last words comprehended as a specific act of speech alleviate the violence of death and familiarize with its horror (as I mentioned at the beginning of my text by evoking the traditions of danse macabre and ars moriendi and by citing Georges Bataille).