Lacan's understanding of the death drive as an effect of the symbolic chain raises the possibility of a symbolic death (connoting narrative ending) before the subject's biological death. The dying Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus might be thought of as occupying such a position. Lacan asks us to consider what, when his life has completely passed over into destiny, remains of Oedipus?

Nietzsche's ‘untimely meditations’ invite, anticipate and sanction future textual interpretations that Nietzsche himself could not have predicted; similar textual strategies exist in the work of Beckett. Such strategies offer an approach to overcoming the impossibility of adequately narrating a life. The psychoanalytic concept ‘part object’ can be extended to model the way parallel processes are at work in psychoanalysis. Beckett's own retelling of the Oedipus story is considered to show how it attempts to answer the question ‘what remains of Oedipus?’