The last definitive word for the whole story

The subject of Broch's book, as the title indicates, is the last twenty four hours of Virgil's life. But death is treated not merely as an event but as the last achviement of man - whether in the sense that moments of dying are  one's last and only chance for knowing what life was all about or in the sense that it is then that one passes judgement upon one's own life. This judgement is not self-accusation, for it is too late for that, nor self-justification, for it is, in a way, too early for that; it is the ultimate effort to find the truth, the last definitive word for the whole story.

Hannah Arendt, sobre o livro de Hermann Broch A Morte de Vergílio, "No Longer and Not Yet", Reflections on Literature and Culture, Stanford University Press, 2007.