Die! Die! Die!

["Sawyer, Keith" <Keith.Sawyer@FMR.Com>]

Anders Hultman <anders.hultman@unisource.se> wrote (...and others shared the 
sentiment):

>I think she is being rescued at the end.

{or basically, the singer lives}

I have a real problem with the narrator living at the end of the song.  This 
objection basically revolves around the events in 'The Jig of Life', where a 
future version of our storyteller appears.

It seems to me that if our protagonist lives, there is a deterministic slant 
to the story - she was fated to live and eventually grow into the Jig of 
Life character.  I find it rather depressing that, after the ordeal, she now 
has knowledge of a future she cannot change - and is still fated to walk 
down that path.

I prefer the interpretation that the narrator dies, thereby creating an 
argument for free will.  Her possible future does try to save her, but in 
the end the proof that her fate was not predetermined by that version of 
herself is her death.  Morbid perhaps, but I would prefer to think that the 
journal of her life had not already been written.

Of course I could bake my cake and eat it by saying the events of Jig of 
Life do not predetermine the rest of her life if she did survive - but 1) 
that'd be a cop-out and 2) then why is the episode in the song?

People tell me I think too much... (and quantity does not beget quality)
keith