Stiamo per morire tutti quanti, non è così

“Stiamo per morire tutti quanti, non è così?” is Roslyn Tabor’s question in The Misfits, but the novel makes the line resonate beyond the character who speaks it. Roslyn’s imagined kinship with the Blonde Actress turns the question into a reflection on mortality, absence, and the life that art both borrows from and gives back.

Roslyn’s Question

In the film, Roslyn asks whether everyone is going to die. The question comes amid her effort to persuade men in the Nevada desert to release the wild horses they have roped. She calls the men liars and killers, and the narrative likens the mustangs to lost, untamed male souls. Roslyn’s plea for the horses gives her awareness of death an ethical force: it is bound to her resistance to cruelty and to her care for vulnerable lives.

The novel presents Roslyn as more than a role that happens to resemble the Blonde Actress. Her longing for a mother who was absent, her sense of having no children, and her adult vulnerability make the character’s words feel like the actress’s private life speaking through a film. Roslyn feeds hungry dogs and men, tends to the old, injured, and grief-stricken, and weeps for men unable to weep for themselves. The question about death belongs to this portrait of a woman who recognizes suffering without claiming to have mastered it.

A Role Made from Life

Roslyn is described as the Blonde Actress’s creation, while her cinematic dialogue imitates the actress’s private speech. The playwright husband wrote the screenplay using dialogue drawn from dramatic events in his wife’s life. The novel entertains the possibility that this act might have been an appropriation of her soul, but rejects the idea that she would blame him for it: their lives and work are figured as mutually given, with Roslyn a gift from one to the other.

That intimacy does not erase the marriage’s ending. The reflection on what the spouses made together closes with the blunt recognition that the Blonde Actress no longer loved him. Roslyn’s question therefore carries more than biographical resemblance: it survives as part of a shared creation after the emotional bond that helped produce it has ended.

The Cliché and the Reality

Later, the Blonde Actress speaks with Fleece about gifts and putting him in her will. When he objects to talk of death, she explains that a character in the film she is making says that everyone must leave sooner or later. Fleece answers from direct experience: he has seen many dead people up close and smelled them, so he does not find death funny. The exchange places the film’s familiar-sounding line against the physical reality Fleece describes.

The Blonde Actress calls that line a cliché, something said many times before. Her dismissal does not cancel the earlier question spoken through Roslyn. Instead, the two moments distinguish a borrowed formula from a line made resonant by context: in Roslyn’s scene, the question is attached to compassion, danger, and the release of the horses; in conversation with Fleece, the actress recognizes the ready-made quality of a similar declaration while confronting his unvarnished knowledge of death. The expression thus links performance and private life without treating every film line as an equally personal revelation.