The Essence of Tragedy in The Book of Job and Oedipus Rex :: comparison compare contrast essays

The Essence of Tragedy in The Book of trading and Oedipus Rex In the search for the essence of the calamity, The Book of Job and Oedipus Rex are central. to each one new tragic protagonist is in some degree a lesser Job or Oedipus, and each new work owes an inborn element to the Counselors and to the Greek idea of the chorus. The Book of Job, especi onlyy the Poets treatment of the low-down and searching Job, is behind Shakespeare and Milton, Melville, Dostoevski, and Kafka. Its mark is on all tragedy of alienation, from Marlowes Faustus to Camus Stranger, in which there is a sense of separation from a once known, normative, and love deity or cosmic order or principle of conduct. In emphasizing dilemma, choice, wretchedness of soul, and guilt, it spiritualized the Promethean groundwork of Aeschylus and made it more acceptable to the Christianized imagination. In working into one dramatic context so great a range of mood---from pessimism and despair to bitterness, defiance, and exalted insight---it is father to all tragedy where the melodic line is on the inner dynamics of bits response to destiny. Oedipus stresses not so such(prenominal) mans guilt or forsakeness as his ineluctable lot, the stark realities which are and forever will be. The Greek tradition is less nostalgic and less visionary---the discrepancy being in emphasis, not in kind. There is little languish for a lost Golden Age, or yearning for utopia, redemption, or ethereal restitution. But if it stresses mans fate, it does not deny him freedom. Dramatic action, of course, posits freedom without it no tragedy could be written. In Aeschylus Prometheus Kratos (or Power) says, None is free but Zeus, but the entire play proves him wrong. Even the Chorus of helpless Sea Nymphs, in siding with Prometheus in the end, defy the bidding of the gods. Aeschylus Orestes was told by Apollo to murder his mother, but he was not compelled to. The spirit with which he acquiesced in his destiny ( a the me which Greek tragedy stresses as Job does not) is of a free man who, though fated, could have withdrawn and not acted at all. Even Euripides, who of all the Greek Tragedians had the direst view of the gods compulsiveness in mans affairs, shows his Medea and Hippolytus as proud and determinative human beings. And, as Cedric Whitman says about the fate of Oedipus, the prophecy merely predicted Oedipus future, it did not determine it.