ABSTRACT
The History Boys provides a clear and literal example of the teacher whose death serves as an occasion to witness his influence over his students. Featured on a recruitment poster for the New York City Teaching Fellows these words were displayed throughout the New York City subway system during the early 2000s. Hector, portrayed in the film as both a beloved beautiful soul and serial fondler. The death of the teacher in film is not always as literal or total or celebrated as it is in Hector's case, in which the end of his life as a teacher also brings about the end of his life as such, as well as his rebirth in his students' lives. Freud's interest in what psychoanalysis comes to call the death instinct stems from his interest in cases that feature a similar, operating seemingly independently of what he had earlier called the pleasure principle.
