Mass for the Dead

wise quite different revisitations are striking enough to set up reverberations: in each, a first-person narrator returns to a scene heavily charged with a perspective long since lived through and rejected (for Charles Ryder it is a callow materialism, for Barrett it is Marxism); in each, these meanings are intertwined with a friendship (Ryder's with Sebastian Flyte, Barretťs with Delmore Schwartz) that had once promised to be as enduring as the perspective but failed that promise. And each is a Mass for the Dead in which the celebrant