Stories about immortality can also explore the possibilities and consequences of living for vast spans of time;

The Harry Potter universe's main antagonist, Lord Voldemort, has a limited form of immortality due to the use of Horcruxes. Horcruxes are magical objects that conceal a portion of a person's soul after the said person commits murder, which "rips the soul apart". Immortality also is touched on in the series by means of a philosopher's stone.

In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, some of the inhabitants of the island of Immortals (near Japan) don't die, but they age and became ill, demented and a nuisance to themselves and those surrounding them. Swift presents immortality as a curse rather than a blessing. The film Zardoz also depicts a dystopian view of immortality, where interest in life has been lost and suicide is impossible.

In the film Highlander, the immortal main character grows cynical after seeing friends and lovers grow old and die.

In the Hyperion Cantos Universe, a parasite originating from the planet Hyperion called the cruciform brings immortality, being able to regenerate the body after death. Wealthy humans can also achieve significant increase of their life expectancy thanks to the expensive Poulsen treatments. 

Tezuka Osamu's lifework Phoenix (known in Japan as Hi no Tori) had a phoenix whose blood would provide immortality, in various age, many "heroes" and "heroines" would strive for immortality only to realize that there is something beyond eternal life. In a story titled "Raise hen", lit. "next world story", the last remaining human male who survived a holocaust and blessed or cursed with immortality through the phoenix blood, would create another beginning of life. In an immortal form, he would see slugs who gained intelligence to yet destroy themselves again in another holocaust. He would seed the earth again with life that would become present day human, meaning us and leave the earth for good to join his sweetheart who passed away billions of years ago in something like a heaven. 

In Douglas Adams' novel Life, the Universe and Everything the character Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged had the misfortune of being immortal due to "a strange accident involving an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands". After becoming immortal, he did everything one can do in life, several times, becoming terribly bored of everything. He then made a plan that, despite being rather foolish, would at least keep him busy: he was going to insult, personally, all the living beings in the universe, in alphabetical order.

The Phantom is a comic character who appears to be immortal, fighting pirates and evil across centuries. However it is just a dynasty of heroes who pass the mask and suit of the Phantom along generations. Their secret is known just to their aides and wives (and the reader).

In Andromeda, the character Trance Gemini is the avatar of the original Vedran sun, and as such, has special powers. She and her "sisters" can live as long as stars do: for billions of years. It's unknown whether Trance has physical immortality, or if she was even ever alive. It is alluded to that she is dead and alive at the same time.

The Dungeon Master in Zork Grand Inquisitor, a spirit in a lantern during the game, accidentally casts an immortality spell on himself while he still has his body. He soon grows terribly bored, and tries many ways of suicide, with little or comical effects. ex "Dear Diary, today I tried to kill myself by shoving a sword through my heart. All I got was heartburn." 

In the films Re-Animator, and subsequently Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator, Dr Herbert West creates a serum that has the ability to re-animate dead tissue and stop its decay. In Re-Animator, re-animated corpses are shown to show some emotion and intelligence if they're fresh enough. However, the antagonist in the story lobotomizes re-animated decaying corpses to make them his slaves. 

Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies is considered to be immortal. It is theorized that each time he is "killed" he is actually just put into a type of sleep while he regenerates enough of his lost and damaged tissue to function normally again. Jason has been killed, but there have been means outside his physical influence that led to his resurrection. When he was first killed, he survived permanent death via his father's wish that he not be cremated before his own murderer incidentally brought him back, leading to a more unstoppable Jason. Jason even survives being blown up, by possessing other people and eventually being reborn through a dead relative. He also survives being blown apart in Jason X and is reconstructed as a cyborg through nanotechnology. It is unknown if some supernatural force surrounding Jason was controlling the device that reconstructed him, or if, like other circumstances, it was just a random event. 

Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies is considered to be immortal, as well. Though he was killed as a human, he exists as a "dream demon", who needs only to be feared to be able to enter people's dreams and cause them harm. Even without this fear, he can exist, either in "limbo" or in Hell. Because of this immortality, he can never be permanently killed. He can only be contained by being forgotten about, and thus prevented from ever entering dreams again. 

The nameless protagonist of the video game Planescape: Torment has a kind of limited immortality: he will die if injured enough, but he will always wake up again shortly afterward, albeit with some or all of his memories missing. This has led to a situation where, over thousands of years, different versions of the protagonist have existed, some good, some evil, and some absolutely insane. The goal of the game is to regain one's mortality and finally die permanently--a rather unconventional ending for a video game.

In the Doctor Who story The Five Doctors, Lord President Borusa of Gallifrey uses the first five regenerations of the Doctor and various companions in a plot to gain the immortality of Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society, for himself. But it turns out to be a trap conceived of by Rassilon to deal with individuals with such a desire. As the First Doctor says in the end, "Immortality is a curse, not a blessing".

Shadow the Hedgehog from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, is an artificial life form created aboard the Space Colony ARK that is also rumored to be immortal. Requiring nothing that most organic creatures do, he can go without food, water, or sleep, and is completely immune to most, if not all, diseases known to mankind. This, coupled with the fact that he was forced to witness his best (and possibly only) friend's murder, creates a chasm between the other characters and himself, making the series' "token badass loner". 

In the story "Tuck Everlasting" by Natalie Babbitt a family lives through the ordeals of immortality after inadvertently drinking from a fountain of youth. 

In the storyline Perry Rhodan is the commander of the first mission to the moon, where they come upon a stranded vessel of an alien race in search of eternal youth. Perry Rhodan uses the superior technology to unite the earth and then continues the search for eternal youth. Ultimately he follows the hints laid out by a higher being called ES ("it" in german) that exists in an incorporeal state. This being chooses Perry Rhodan and a select few of his companions to attain Agelessness (ES says "I grant you everlasting life, not rejuvenation") in order for them to pursue goals set by ES.

Poul Anderson's The Boat of a Million Years concerns several otherwise ordinary people who stop aging at maturity. The book follows their struggles through the millennia, through the late 20th century and beyond.