In my opinion Learning to be Dead by Italo Calvino is the most complex story we have read. Without any active plot or characters, Calvino expresses the incommunicatable task that is learning to be dead. Calvino, with a didactic tone and theme, explores the immensely complex relationship humans have with our being and this includes our being dead. Death is an essential state which Calvino explains by saying "You must not confuse being dead with not being. Learning to be Dead resists all interpretation in the story, seeing its stunning sparseness, but it is interpreted in its application to life. There are no symbols only thoughts, which naturally have to be interpreted in the mind.The structure, lacking plot, active characters, and objective action is deceptively simple, but the implications for being have a complexity hardly covered on paper. Why must one learn to be dead? Calvino explains the difficulty in the task, but the unanswerable question is: Death is innately incommunicable so how do we learn to be dead? The dead's reluctant and smug smile expresses the irresponsibility no living being can assume. There is no variety to interpretation available with the title. The title Learning to be Dead offers only the interpretation to the story that we are all learning to be dead because one day we will all be dead.