- the pretended death case has come to a point where he considers the environment so
fraught with menace that nothing in the environment has any intent save to kill him and
that death is immediate. He has insufficient energy or reason remaining even to appeal for
help and, indeed, he considers that there is no person or object to which he can so
appeal, and so he attempts to demonstrate to anything in the environment that it has won
and that he is already dead. (SOS,
p. 172)