ABSTRACT
The Living End explores how people might live through the AIDS crisis without becoming self-destructive like Luke, who blames society for his predicament, or passive like Jon, who blames himself. The fact of being infected with HIV must somehow be integrated into the world of meaning and self-knowledge that Luke and Jon had previously taken for granted. Their test results mobilize a confusing reaction of power, fear, and desire; to survive, they must embrace as part of themselves a fearful disease which our society prefers to ignore. The Living End takes the two extreme, opposing responses of Luke and Jon to being HIVpositive and resolves them dialectically into something more healthy.
