A Literature of Malaise, Essay Example

Oedipus the King

Oedipus the King opens with misfortune in Ancient Greece: a plague has stricken Thebes. Called upon by Oedipus, Tiresias, the blind prophet offers a cryptic message and divulges Oedipus his fate in riddle: the murderer of Laius will turn out to be both father and brother to his own children, and the son of his own wife. Furthering his interrogations, Oedipus finds from a Shepherd charged with the job of killing the child begotten to Jocasta and Lauis,’ leads to unwanted truths. With Jocasta’s reactionary suicide having been found out, Oedipus pulls pins from her robe and stabs his own eyes until bleeding in carnage. After wandering years in exile from Thebes, Oedipus arrives in Athens a blind and frail old man. Oedipus’s second daughter, Ismene transmits the news from the Oracle at Delphi. She informs him that his son, Eteocles, has overthrown Polynices, the elder, and a counter by Polynices’ troops in Argos is forthcoming. Both sides of the dispute travel en route simultaneously in an effort to take Oedipus into custody as claim the right to bury him in their kingdoms. Sensing the time of his death has come, Oedipus requests rites de passage on his corpse with the assurance of King Theseus and the divine grace of his city. In this way Theseus’ destiny as ruler will extend in perpetuity to his heirs. At his mysterious death, “the lightless depths of Earth burst [. . .] open in kindness to receive him” and humbled, yet honest Oedipus passes to the underworld from which he was borne.

A Worn Path

Set against the backdrop of the rural South of the United States contiguous to Axis proclamation of war on the nation in World War II, Eudora Welty’s (1941) A Worn Path tells a story of lone African-American woman walking the southern landscape to obtain medicine for her ill grandson. Character development is constructed through the lens of her experience, as Phoenix Jackson makes her way through the Mississippi woods in a chilly December dawn. Her eyesight poor, she taps her way, yet it becomes evident that she has made this journey many times before.  A ritual journey the storyline unfolds obstacles as thorn bushes and barbed wire impede her progress, yet she persists over concern of her dying grandson whom has swallowed lye. An encounter with a white hunter brings the plot to its apex, and lines between white on black hate are made definitive, with the hunter only pulling back from killing Phoenix in the last instance. She too is defiant, and proceeds to pick up a coin that he has dropped, despite all humiliation. Candid in confrontation with U.S. society, we see the perplexing distinction between those whom are seen to be seeking “charity,” or as we see in the hunter’s chagrin, seeking “Santa Claus,” and those with full rights and responsibilities. If Phoenix’ trials represent a broader scope of tensions present within Welty’s context, so too do they sort through with such precise differentiation that Americans do not find themselves in the face of international enmity, but also not in the faces of fellow citizens at home.

My Papa’s Waltz

Small –scale lyricism is part of an oeuvre of poetic devices employed by mid-twentieth century American poet like Theodore Roethke, and reflects Bohemian tendencies in each stanza’s commiseration.  Influential to poetic thought in the forthcoming decades, Roethke’s ability to make us ‘tangle until we’re sore’ strikes a cord as evidentiary to his genius, as his inheritance in the songs of Tom Waits. Mapped through a kaleidoscope of everyday instances where man attempts to touch God. If the first stanza begins with “whisky on your breath” we have not left, but are looking forward to bed, “still clinging to your shirt” (16).

Ethan Frome

Edith Jones Wharton’s use of both internal and external dialogue through the characters in Ethan Frome finds its source of confrontation in traditional institutions, and the imbalance of power perpetuated between men and women leading to destruction at the heart of interpersonal relationships. All factors considered in reflection on a full life, desire, happiness, selfishness, reputation, responsibility, and morality are crafted through the struggles of Mattie and Ethan, as they struggle to maintain emotive continuity, amidst a context of virtual indentured poverty and a farm run by two discontented old crones. Articulated longings, and the injustice of the world culminate in the death one, and not the other, and “if [Mattie] ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ‘cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues” (Epilogue).

Works Cited

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays. New York: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Roethke, Theodore. My Papa’s Waltz. Web.

Welty, Eurdora. A Worn Path. In: A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. New York, NY: Harcourt & Brace, 1941. Web.

Wharton, Edith Jones. Ethan Frome. The Literature Page, 1911. Web.