In literature,the motif of death has been constructed as "the poetics of death" when human beings came to realize the inevitability of their mortality in an early stage.As the aesthetical and philosophical conceptualization of death has evolved gradually,the western and eastern ways of expressing death has taken on the trend of "harmony without uniformity",which is reflected in Mo Yan's Wa and Michael Cunningham's The Hours.In Wa,Mo Yan takes the state of "Dasein" between life and death as the "Possibility-for-Being",which provides possibilities for the state of "being" in "Being-towards-Death".While in The Hours,Cunningham tries to convey the individual's initiation,selectivity and sense of responsibility at the death-hour through three "Being-towards-Death" characters' diachronic experience.Although the main characters in the two texts have undergone different forms of "fear of death" and "near death" experiences,they make same claim of Thinking on death in their literary discourses.To the living,death is always in the perpetual state of "non-arrival".Facing the moment of end of one's life,we are conscious of the fact that the "Possibility-for-Being" and impossibility of "Being-towards-death" are unavoidable.This predicament has remained a reflective and intractable topic in literature.