There is an eschatological ring to recent history: climate change, COVID-19, and crises of political representation have each inspired proclamations of the end of the world. While such historical events are singular and distinct, the impulse to interpret them as a finality is not. Recent debates on the phenomenon treat this impulse broadly as a residue of an ancient category of faith, an evocative metaphor at best or a destructive irrationality at worst. Missing, however, is a sustained inquiry into the question of eschatological enunciation – not only the story of the end, but its storyteller, or how voice relates to the finality it proclaims. Reading for the End explores the ongoing practice of eschatological anticipation through analysis of two literary representations – that of the end of the world and that of the postulated subject that witnesses and reports it, seemingly sequestered from the event. I approach the aporias of eschatological representation as at once an aesthetic, political, and psychic problematic: I draw upon the Marxian interpretation of eschatological speech as a political form of negation and turn to psychoanalysis to understand the ambivalence of the desire for the end expressed in the witness inherent to its staging. My introduction explores the determinations of the end of the world and literary perspective. I explore eschatological speech as a transhistorical evocation of political promise and the suppositions subtending the representation of perspective in literary voice. I then analyze how perspective challenges or problematizes depictions of the end as it confines the latter to the scope of a narrator. My first chapter, “A Voice at the End of the World,” accounts for the remainder inherent to eschatological representation through comparative analyses of texts from Jean Paul, Catulle Mendès, Mary Shelley, and J.G. Ballard. I demonstrate the linguistic basis of the phenomenon of survival through the insoluble split between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement. “The Contemporary End: Two Variations” applies the problematic of narratorial survival to two evocations of the end of the world – climate apocalypse and the end of history. Turning to Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Science of God by Jean-Pierre Brisset, and The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus, I treat survival as a narrative instantiation of the radically Other in species entanglement and utopian imagination. “End without End: A Season in Hell and the Language of Death” interrogates the refusal of the speaker of the poem to represent his death and the redirection of eschatological expectation to the act of writing. Through an analysis of Rimbaud’s emphasis on method, I show how the process of inscription, as the death of the speaker, suggests that the end is not an event, but a condition of the subject. My conclusion argues through Kant’s essay “The End of All Things” that, in the place of the universal, all-encompassing divine Voice, the problematic relation of enunciation to the end can be the possibility of an ongoing practice of positing the end. While not grounded in a reflection of what is, eschatological speech can intuit the promise of what could be as it organizes the world under the sign of its passing.