When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.

In this epigrammatic line, the speaker pushes despair to its absolute limit: once material security and even hope are gone, mere continued living can feel not only pointless but humiliating (“a disgrace”). The final clause—“death a duty”—turns that despair into a grim moral imperative, as if self-erasure becomes the only honorable response to total defeat. Read as a W. C. Fields–style dark joke, the extremity is part of the effect: it satirizes melodramatic fatalism and the tendency to dress personal misery in lofty, moral language. The quote’s bite lies in its inversion of conventional ethics, where life is the duty and death the disgrace.