ABSTRACT
The Heart Goes Last deals with thought-provoking themes such as the ethical limits in the fight for survival, what it means to be human, the relationship between biotechnology and ethics in the context of global capitalism, and the construction of gendered identities and limited freedom in the utopian field. Stemming from the idea that Dante’s Inferno is the representation of human progression toward the “transhuman” or the “posthuman,” this chapter follows a parallel journey in which the characters of the novel try to reach their particular Heaven but end up imprisoned in a contemporary representation of Dante’s Hell. In the novel, there are several possible examples of the sins epitomized in the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno. From “Limbo,” the apocalyptic dystopian setting where the desperate are waiting for Heaven to “Lust,” in which sex is discussed as an element of resistance, as well as the representation of posthuman pleasures and the ethical implications of sex between humans and machines. Then “Gluttony,” or renouncing to freedom for “food,” “Greed,” or the human body’s commodification, “Anger,” revenge, and the reversal of gender roles, “Heresy,” or destroying systems from within and “Violence,” or the technological and biological modification of the human body, finally, “Fraud,” or how the novel breaks and mocks the patriarchal “Doris Day” stereotype and “Treachery” or how far we, Western citizens, are willing to go to maintain our status and system.
