The most powerful death scene in 20th-century literature

I think it’s fair to say that Joachim’s demise, in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1927), is the greatest death in 29^th-century literature (Tolstoy death of Prince Andrew [right character?] in W&P is the greatest in the 19^th century). To watch this brave and stoic young man wrestle with his condition, keeping his thoughts and fears largely to himself, refusal to blame anyone include the questionable medical staff at the Hofhaus clinic, maintaining the illusion – to himself – that he might return to his post in the army, and his gradual slipping away from those around him, including his mother and his cousin Hans, is incredibly sad and probabably clinically accurate, and in that sense even palliative as his physical suffering is minimal. What reader will fail to remember this scene, or the medical director’s rebuke to the protagonist Hans cannot for some time grasp the gravity and inevitability of his cousin’s fate (the fate, ultimately, of us all)? Perhaps the drama of this scene is heightened as played against the extensive and relentless arguments of the two intellectual antagonists – the humanist Settembrini and the, I don’t even know what to call him, doctrinaire and combative Jesuit (convert from Judaism) Naphta. I suspect that no reader can follow all the nuances of their arguments, which become so intense and obscure as to be almost comedic (and how can we not be overwhelmed by Mann’s knowledge as well!) – though the stakes are of the highest. They are dueling for Hans’s soul, and in that sense for the soul of all huamnkind, in an intellectual debate that becomes physical and tragic.