The Last Walk

Dr Brandt, the prison doctor, takes Otto Quangel's pulse and quietly offers an anaesthetic, declined. He furiously refuses the ritual last meal of acorn coffee and margarine bread, then submits to the executioner and his assistants, who shave and crop him with brisk patter, asking him to sweep up his own hair for a wigmaker's side trade. The prison governor and Prosecutor Pinscher arrive; Pinscher gloats over his conviction, but Quangel tells him to take a walk, and the sentence is read aloud. Escorted through the corridors, Quangel hears a cry of 'Farewell, comrade!' and answers reflexively. In the execution room the executioner shakes his hand — 'No hard feelings!' — and Quangel is strapped to the table, the blade looming above. He hears the whispered 'Now!' and bites for the cyanide vial, but a surge of vomit washes it away before his teeth close. The blade falls a moment later. Three minutes on, the doctor pronounces him dead.

Bureaucratic ritual and grim comedy — the executioner's patter, the hair sold for wigs — carry the scene instead of pathos. The failed cyanide bite is the novel's cruellest irony: Quangel's one act of control, held in reserve for months, betrayed by his own body in the final second.