Where ‘disappointed hope’ and ‘death life’ converge: neo naturalist realism and undocumented futurity in Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life

This article argues that Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life reimagines the contemporary US immigrant novel by staging undocumented life at the intersection of structural violence and ‘disappointed’ hope. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s concept of hope as an anticipatory ‘Not-Yet’ shadowed by defeat and Homi Bhabha’s migration-centred idea of ‘death-life’, it interprets Zou Lei’s trajectory as an embodied figuration of survival lived in proximity to social death. Lish’s blend of documentary realism and neo-naturalist determinism renders deportability, informal labour, post 9/11 security regimes, and racialised urban infrastructures as environments that overdetermine action while remaining porous to contingent, affective acts of endurance. The article demonstrates how the novel’s painstaking attention to detention, work, and urban marginality functions as a counter archive to legal and economic regimes that produce ‘illegality’, even as it foregrounds a residual, pragmatic utopian impulse in the everyday. In doing so, it brings American literary history, migration studies, and the philosophy of hope into a critical constellation for rethinking realism, agency, and futurity in the contemporary security state.