Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to MiltonIn Paradise Lost, Adam asks, "Why do I overlive?" Adam's anguished question is the basis for a critical analysis of living too long as a neglected but central theme in Western tragic literature. Emily Wilson examines this experience in works by Milton and by four of his literary predecessors: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, and Shakespeare. Each of these writers composed works in which the central character undergoes unbearable suffering or loss, hopes for death, but goes on living. Mocked with Death makes clear that tragic works need not find their moral and aesthetic conclusion in death and that, in some instances, tragedy consists of living on rather than dying. Oedipus's survival at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus is clearly one such instance; another Euripides' Heracles. In Seneca's Hercules Furens, overliving becomes an expression of anxieties about both political and literary belatedness. In King Lear and Macbeth, the sense of overliving produces a divided sense of self. For Milton, in both Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost, overliving is a theological problem arising from the tension between mortal conceptions of time and divine providence. Each writer in this tradition, Wilson concludes, attempts to diminish the anxieties arising from living past one's time but cannot entirely minimize them. Tragedies of overliving remain disturbing because they remind us that life is rarely as neat as we expect and hope it be and that endings often come too late. |
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... past : the gods can see both things invisible and things long past , and will hold men to a past and invisible standard in the present and visible world ( 276-81 ) . Oedipus shows that there is a parallel between his past ( the actions ...
... past . He tells the Polyneices figure , his son Michael , “ Those who flee from their past will always lose the race . " 15 He must confess his fault even in those forgotten past actions which do not look , to society , like crimes ...
... past from his quick temper . She suggests that in taking revenge on Polyneices , Oedipus will be repeating his own mistakes of the past , such as the self - blinding ( 1195–1200 ) . She urges him to look not at the present circumstances ...
Contents
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus | 24 |
Oedipus Coloneus | 41 |
Euripides Heracles | 66 |
Copyright | |
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