On a Fall, 1964 windy day, and while my family was living in a second-story Beirut, Lebanon, seaside apartment, I watched and was mesmerized by Spencer Tracy’s performance in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. By the time Santiago, the old fisherman, began his struggle with the Marlin and the ensuing Hollywood-made nautical storm More
The post The Theme of the Quest: Gilgamesh and Enkidu as Prototypes for Hemingway’s Robert Jordan, Frederic Henry, and Santiago appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
On a Fall, 1964 windy day, and while my family was living in a second-story Beirut, Lebanon, seaside apartment, I watched and was mesmerized by Spencer Tracy’s performance in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. By the time Santiago, the old fisherman, began his struggle with the Marlin and the ensuing Hollywood-made nautical storm and unbeknownst to us, the back balcony door overlooking the Mediterranean Sea blew wide open. Spellbound and distracted by the movie’s storm and Santiago’s struggle, we were unaware that the wide-open door ushered in an actual Mediterranean wind storm and blended it with its Hollywood counterpart.
Talk about adding tantalizing sensory responses of the visual and auditory types; that experience left an indelible impact on me.
Within a day I heid me to the United States News Agency quarters to check out and read The Old Man and the Sea. Ironically, some 25 years later the same agency would commission me to write four articles on Dr. Michael Shadid, the father of Cooperative medicine in America.
I would revisit Hemingway in Graduate school and noted a thematic progression in his works. In the 1980s Joseph Campbell graced us with his presence and brilliant mind in Terrel More, the old English Department’s hunting grounds which is now a parking lot. Campbell and Carl Jung would set me on the road to delving into mythology and archetypal patterns, and served as a roadmap for a more serious study of the theme of the Quest, a theme I encountered while teaching the Illiad, Odessey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, to name but a few literary works.
In 2001 I was invited to present a lecture to a packed auditorium at Boading University, an engineering university in the People’s Republic of China. After the lecture and a relentless Q & A session, some 70 students begged for more. Seated on the floor in front of the riser, the first question went like this: “Professo Alaby [sic.], in Enest [sic.] Hemingway novel The Old Man and the Sea, what did Santiago accomplish?” Astounded at this future engineer’s question, I would articulate, albeit in abbreviated form, the theme of the quest in Hemmingway’s novels.
Bingo! I had to get over my procrastination about visiting, researching, and writing about the archetypal theme which is the subject of this essay.
It was not until the late hours of December 5, 2013 that my procrastination ended. On December 6, 2013, I was scheduled for a 6 am bypass surgery. Always the optimist, at 10 pm the night before, December 5, 2013, I sent an abstract and a narrative to the program chair of the 16th Biennial Hemingway conference to be held in June 2014, in Venice, Italy, a city whose charm captivated authors, artists, musicians and one of Ernest Hemingway’s favorite cities, and a city about which I’d previously written and photographed. I proposed to present a a paper on the theme of the Quest in Gilgamesh and Heminway’s works.
10 days later the invitation showed up on my computer screen.
I was back in the classroom for the 2014 Spring semester, and in early February 2014 I was instructed to pack 41 years of research, proposal and other writings and publications, photography, 10 years of AEGIS documentation, consulting, correspondence, sculpture and carving tools, including over 3,500 books, and move out of my office. Moses Provine was to be renovated and no alternative office space was provided. Two VPs did not respond to my plea to find me suitable quarters, and a dean with three vacant offices in his building informed me “I am not sure my faculty will welcome you.” Thrown under the bus by the powers that be, I presented my case to President Horne. His response was: “Let’s pray about it.” His prayer went nowhere. That is typical Baptist response to solving problems. And on the first day of Spring vacation 2014, 3,000 books were evicted to the OBU library and the other 500 to the Arkadelphia High School. All the rest of my professional life, 41 years of it, were evicted and hauled off to a garage, a basement, and other storage space. No construction began on Moses Provive until the Middle of May 15.
Having been forced to leave my native Palestine, and having been a persona non grata for the first 31 years of my life, this egregiously shabby, and callous disregard for a man recovering from a quintuple bypass surgery was my lowest point at an institution I hold dear to my heart. That was, in the metaphorical sense, my “belly of the whale experience.”
And I resolved not to be either defined by it or to deter me from my quest, namely, to pour all my intellectual, physical, and emotional faculties into producing a decent paper.
And in May 2014 the indifatigable Johnny wink volunteered to be an audience of one to listen and critique my paper.
Thus it was that, accompanied with my bride of 44 years, along with over 400 participants from 28 countries, we attended receptions, lectures and forums on myriad Hemingway topics, including site trips to Folsata di Piave, where, at age 18, ambulance driver Hemingway was injured, a visit to the Ivanich hunting lodge where Hemingway went duck hunting as well as the Ivanich estate whose main structure was bombed by the allies during WW II. An entire day was spent on the Island of Torcello, a Hemingray favorite haunt, where poetry, readings, and a semi formal event was held. La Belle Femme and I and I managed to attend a Vivaldi concert in Venice’s 16th century concert hall.
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In Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, the protagonist, Gilgamesh, and his alter ego, Enkidu, undertake a lengthy journey, encounter numerous challenges, and experience heroic adventures. After Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh continues the quest in search of immortality. As an archetypal motif, the quest, as portrayed through the harrowing experiences of the God-king and his unsullied travelling companion, ends in Gilgamesh’s realization that he could not achieve immortality. Enkidu’s death propels Gilgamesh to continue his journey and to be tested repeatedly. At end of the journey, the hero discovers his mortality, gains wisdom, and becomes the better for it. Taken collectively, Ernest Hemingway’s protagonists Robert Jordan, Frederic Henry, and Santiago, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and the Old Man and the Sea, respectively, embark on similar self-discovery quests. While Jordan and Henry’s quests Parallel Gilgamesh’s journey up till Enkidu’s premature death, Santiago’s ordeal and triumph parallel Gilgamesh’s solo journey in the second half of the epic and the supreme challenges these heroes confronted on their final quests. The purpose of this paper is to compare the theme of the quest in the aforementioned works and to attempt to draw parallels in the archetypal patterns as they unfold in each composition.
Unfortunately time does not allow me to present the detailed analysis I would like to have presented and, as a result, I will highlight the salient points.
I would also like to state the following: I am not suggesting that Ernest Hemingway was either familiar with or influenced by this ancient Mesopotamian myth, a myth that preceded Homer’s Iliad, the cornerstone of Western literature, by at least 1500 years. And, while Gilgamesh’s plot-line follows a perfectly developed linear archetypal pattern employing the theme of the Quest as an essential idea to its plot, theme, and characterization, in their entirety, Hemingway’s three works are a perfectly executed literary triptych in which this archetypal theme is progressively and prominently drawn out.
In his monumental work on mythology, Joseph Campbell highlighted the following: No matter the culture or time frame in which a myth exists, there is a set pattern, a mold, if you wish, of events/experiences/phases/junctures undertaken by the hero. Campbell refers to these interlocked junctures as the “Structure of the Mono-Myth” in which the sequential events are methodically conjoined in a linear structure. Each event serves as a thematic and transitional building block that is intertwined with its subsequent plot line, hence setting the stage for the succeeding set of events in a thematically interlacing fashion. These junctures are as follows:
First: The hero exists in an ordinary world.
Second: The hero is called to undertake a journey – at first with some reluctance.
Third: The journey takes the hero to a different world.
Fourth: At first the hero refuses, but the refusal may spell trouble.
Fifth: The acceptance of a Call.
Sixth: The journey challenges and tests the endurance and strength of the hero, both mental and physical.
Seventh: Supernatural forces appear.
Eighth: The hero needs a helper to fulfill the quest.
Ninth: Each hero is tested in the form of trials and ordeals. Sometimes this is referred to as the Belly of the Whale experience that induces a final separation from a previous personality trait.
Tenth: There is a reward after the testing and the overcoming of the ordeal, and the hero exhibits a willingness to undergo change.
Eleventh: The hero grows as a result of the challenges. At the end there is an atonement, a lesson to be learned, a sort of apotheosis as a result of an arduous journey that tempers the hero.
Yet other ingredients are the following: Villains exist. Mentors/guides exist to provide guiding principles. A herald brings the call to adventure. The hero encounters guardians, or gatekeepers, who direct him, as well as tricksters who cause mischief, and possibly a woman as temptress, a kind of femme fatale.
By drawing on Jung’s analysis of the mono-myth archetypes, the Quest can be summarized thusly: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of super-natural wonder: fabulous forces are then encountered and a decisive history is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
To reiterate, in their structure, The Epic of Gilgamesh, For Whom The Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea adhere to the construct of the mono-myth.
An ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh is amongst the earliest known works of literary fiction and is believed to have originated in a series of Sumerian legends about a mythological hero-king named Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh might have been a real 27th century BC ruler of the Early Dynastic II Period. Scholars believe that early versions of the poem appeared in an oral tradition sometime during the second millennium BC during the period of the Third Dynasty of UR. With the invention of cuneiform by the Sumerians, the poem was committed to clay tablets and was composed in a series of somewhat loosely connected narratives, more like independently arranged dramatic acts. Sometime in the second millennium BC the Akkadians collated the tablets in a more complete structure under the title He Who Saw the Deep /// Sha Naqba imuru (Unknown Mysteries) or Surpassing All other Kings /// Shutur eli Sharri. Most scholars agree that the text, in its current form, was edited sometime between 1300 and 1000 BC. Discovered in 1849 in the library of Ashurbanipal, the 12 existing clay tablets, written in Babylonian, a dialect of the Akkadian language, are today accepted as the most complete and definitive text.
The Mesopotamian gods create Gilgamesh to rule over the city of Uruk. This god-king is endowed with physical beauty and brute prowess, two qualities that became the root of his vanity. He engages in numerous unwarranted wars that kill the young men, he despoils the maidens, and takes women from their husbands and lovers. Hearing the citizens’ complaints, the gods create Enkidu as a counterbalance. Because Enkidu is endowed with human form yet by nature he was half human and half animal, he lived in perfect harmony amongst the animals, hunting with them and eating uncooked food. He is, in effect, the king-protector of wild game, ruling above them as Gilgamesh ruled over men. Realizing that Enkidu has the necessary qualities to neutralize Gilgamesh, a hunter arranges for a prostitute to spend seven days with Enkindu; she seduces him and schools him in all the arts of sumptuous sensuous pleasures. This indulgence transforms him into a civilized, urban citizen.
When Gilgamesh and Enkidu first meet they lock themselves in a robust adversarial fight, a contest barely won by Gilgamesh. This encounter ends in an amicable embrace and seems to highlight the conflict between the civilized and wild worlds, a recurring theme in both Mesopotamian civilization and in numerous Hemingway works. In his quest for immortality, Gilgamesh and his new-found companion slay Humbaba in the hopes of gaining immortality. Their victory is short-lived, for prior to his death Humbaba invokes curses and pleads with Enlil, the god of wind and storm, who, by denying the duo Humbaba’s seven splendors, renders this a hollow victory.
Because Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar’s sexual advances, she sends the Bull of Heaven to exact revenge on the people of Uruk. The protagonists are therefore forced to destroy this beast, an act for which Ishtar exacts a heavy price. The Goddess of War, Love, Fertility and Sex, Ishtar would settle for nothing less than Enkidu’s death, an event whose tectonic tremors awaken Gilgamesh and force him to confront his own mortality for the first time. This turning into self induces a call for the final and most challenging quest Gilgamesh has to assume.
Gilgamesh sets out on a perilous journey in search of Utnapishtim and his wife, the only humans, who, having survived the Great Flood, were the sole living beings to be granted immortality. After overcoming a series of challenging Herculean-style obstacles, Gilgamesh embarks on a perilous voyage to Utnapishtim’s island and is about to undertake the most challenging quest. Namely, he had to persist in remaining awake for six days and seven nights, and he had to seek and hold onto an aquatic plant. He fails both tests — first by his inability to stay awake, and second, by losing the plant to a serpent. Having been tested in numerous ways and having undertaken arduous journeys, Gilgamesh’s final Belly of the Whale experiences render him into a wise hero-king fully attuned to his mortality and fully fit and committed to ruling Uruk.
Published in 1940, the title for For Whom the Bell Tolls is appropriated from John Donne’s Meditation XVII and is set in the late 1930’s during the Spanish civil war. Hemingway drew on his experiences as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Robert Jordan, the novel’s protagonist, pursues his quest by answering the call to travel to Spain to fight alongside the Republicans. He is affiliated with the International Brigade that is opposed to Francisco Franco’s Fascist regime.
Taking leave from his college position (as a Spanish Professor) and because of his expertise in dynamite and demolition, Jordan is tasked with the demolition of a bridge that is believed to be of strategic significance. Because of his linguistic fluency and his cultural sensitivity to the mores of the mountain people, he is able to gain the trust of a band of gypsies. Looming in his subconscious mind is his father’s suicide, a tragic event that rocked his world and left an indelible mark on him. In a series of flashbacks Jordan relives this tragedy and, by utilizing the 3rd person omniscient narrative technique, Hemingway’s plot, set in the Guadarrama Mountain range not far from Segovia, morphs into reflective reminiscences and fast-paced unraveling events. The actions are compressed and funneled into a last week of May , 1939, time- frame, and are condensed into four days and five nights. The plot unravels itself in interlacing thought sequences where past experiences serve as transitional devices in an interconnected sequence of evolving events.
Pilar, the old Gypsy woman, is Jordan’s main helper, and it is her very committed, tough and steadfast character and ruggedness that serve as the glue that holds the rag-tag band of Republicans together. Like Jordan, she possesses an enduring mental and physical strength that is the catalyst that keeps her husband at bay and the force upon which Maria and the rest of the characters draw. As Jordan goes through upheavals, especially after Pablo absconds with the dynamite, it is Pilar who remains steadfast. She supervises most of the activities, including the acquisition of food stuffs and the preparation of meals, coordinating the daily chores, and serving as a cheerleader when things appear bleak.
Because she was relegated to performing the menial tasks of cooking and cleaning, Jordan’s initial impression of Maria is lukewarm. However, as he begins to engage with her in a series of dialogues and after he learns that her parents were brutally butchered in a barbaric ritual and her subsequently being subjected to a heinous and humiliating violation of her body and soul, Jordan is drawn to her emotionally and physically.
Like Enkidu, Jordan’s sexual encounters and the deep feelings he developed for Maria are life-changing experiences. He finds a new lust for life and does his best to protect Maria. And even though the destruction of the bridge did not have the expected military outcome in the final scene, Jordan, now maimed by a tank explosion and trapped under his horse, felt that by saving Maria he performed his duty.
In 1918 Hemingway joined the Italian Red Cross as an ambulance driver. On July 8, 1918, he was struck by mortar, and subsequently shipped to a Milan hospital for recovery. There he met nurse Agnes Von Kurowsky, and fell in love with her. Drawing on his personal experience, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929. The primary theme is war and its enervating impact on human beings. Tenente, or Mr. Henry (as he is initially introduced), the novel’s protagonist, narrates the events in the form of reminiscent personal episodes. Frederic Henry’s initial quest was to lend support to the allied forces in the role of an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, the events for which were based on WWI battles occurring sometime between1916-1918. Henry is initially detached from the unfolding events on the battlefields and performs his duties perfunctorily and in a conscious aloofness that disengages him from the chaos and brutality. The consumption of alcohol in great quantities and card games with the garrulous Rinaldi, the Italian surgeon/roommate and others help dull, ameliorate, and divert attention from the permeating carnage. These discussions serve as a means of glossing over the pervasive carnage. After he is wounded and while convalescing from a battle wound in a Milan hospital, Henry meets English nurse Catherine Barkley, a Voluntary Aid Detachment British Red Cross nurse, and immediately falls in love with her.
While Henry’s passionate love for Catherine dulls his idealism and commitment to his duties and initiates a distancing from the humdrum of military campaigns, Catherine’s initial flirtations with him are merely a coping mechanism to help her overcome the death of her fiancé. However, what initially start out as flirtatious overtures and a distraction for Catherine soon turn into a deep attachment. The couple soon finds solace in each other’s company and become physically and emotionally devoted to each other: she as a refuge from grief, and he to distance himself from the terrible slaughter. The prevailing ambivalence about the war begins to set in when Henry was forced to return to the front after his three-month period of convalescence. And he begins to seriously question the big lie about Le Gloire de Guerre.
And just as Gilgamesh is forced to bid farewell to Enkidu and Jordan is forced to bid farewell to Maria, Henry, after a brief period of physical, mental, and emotional healing in Switzerland, is forced to bid farewell to Catherine soon after she delivers their stillborn baby and hemorrhages to death.
And just like the Gilgamesh narrative, death is a major theme in these works. The theme of death, the fear of wars and butchery, and the loss of innocence are common themes threaded more overtly in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and most tellingly in A Farewell to Arms.
In the latter, as the title suggests, all romantic conceptions of war are destroyed, and Hemingway sensitizes us to how modern arms, designed especially for mass murder, dispel any notion that wars are noble. Jordan and Henry lose their idealism about the respective causes for which they ideally signed up, and become cynical and suspicious of the call to arms. In For Whom, the account of an orgy of savagery and brutality in Pablo’s town explicitly exposes the futility of war – people lose their humanity and their innocence. And in A Farewell, Henry opines the following in a series of interspersed statements: “Still nobody was whipping any one on the Western front. Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Year’s War …. I don’t believe in victory anymore… abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates … But it was not my show.” On the other hand and because of his resignation to his quest of destroying the bridge, Jordan and his comrades were ready to do “as all good men should.” That is, die and sacrifice. And as Jordan lay in wait for the final coup de grace, he choose not to commit suicide like his father: “You have to be awfully occupied with yourself to do a thing like that,” he observes. Jordan’s refusal to commit suicide elevates and gives nobility to his life; by accepting his fate, he becomes a true tragic hero.
Like Gilgamesh and (to a lessor extent) Jordan, Frederic Henry acts impulsively. He becomes so detached from reality and kills, execution style, an Italian engineer, for refusing to help free the vehicle from the mire. To free himself from the burden of this moral transgression and to run away from a devolving spiral of violence, Henry’s quest turns into a flight for survival, a deep yearning for Catherine, and the deep aspiration that he would soon find her. Thus, what started out as merely a quest “to do good” as an ambulance driver, became a quest and a hijra for survival, and Catherine was the traveling companion and the magnetic north needle that drew him, both literally and figuratively, to a safe haven in Switzerland. While Catherine’s coquetry turned into real love, Henry’s loyalty to a human cause turns into loyalty for Catherine. Much like the expressionistic Edward Munch and Ernst Kirchner canvases, the relationships between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Jordan and Maria, Henry and Catherine blend the real and the illusionary worlds. Love and war, love and passion, love and hate, resignation and acceptance, forbearance and impatience, sickness and health, denial and acquiescence, fear and flight, mind and heart, impulse vs. composure, wounding and healing, life and death, trepidation and hope, yearning and finding love and losing it in the blink of an eye, physical, emotional and mental anguish and the analgesic and corrective antidotes are all cast in settings of ominous brutality in which the main characters attempt to distance themselves from seemingly legitimized senseless behavior . Some examples of the Belly of the Whale experience are Enkidu’s regret at having participated in the senseless killing of the Beast, Humbaba. Enkidu and Gilgamesh are deaf to reality and mortality and do not listen to advice or morality. So too, early in the novel Jordan is told by Pilar, “Pablo’s woman,” “thou art a miracle of deafness – it is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist.” And just as Gilgamesh has to finally accept his mortality, in the final scene, Jordan, realizing that he will ultimately lose his life, accepts his mortality and opts out of suicide.
When the novel opens, Jordan’s accomplishments are not heroic. Yet as he lay immobilized and in wait of the inevitable, call it the belly of the whale moment, Jordan’s pensees reflechissantes finale afford him the opportunity to take stock of his vitae brevis and he realizes that his life, his quest if you wish, could be summed up thusly: He has finally developed an absolute brotherhood with people, especially Maria, and not the cause. Hemingway likens this “absolute brotherhood,” to an “integration into the world.” In this triumphant moment Jordan is metaphorically drafting his final curriculum vitae, his final will and testament, if you wish. His thoughts reflect an awareness that he’s accounting for posterity. As he crosses the t’s and dots the i’s he attains his moment of apotheosis with stoic fortitude . He notes “that the gypsies see something, feel something.” Finally assured that “Pilar will take care of [Maria],” he tells himself to “Stay with what you believe now. Don’t get cynical. The time is too short and you have just sent her away. Each does what he can. You can do nothing for yourself but perhaps you can do something for another. Well, we had all our luck in four days. Not four days. It was afternoon when I first got there and it will not be noon today. That makes not quite three days and three nights. Keep it accurate, he said, quite accurate. I think you better get down now, he thought. You better get fixed around some way where you will be useful instead of leaning against this tree like a tramp. You have had much luck. There are many worse things than this. Everyone has to do this, one day or another. You are not afraid of it once you know you have to do it, are you? No, he said truly.”
In 1936 Hemingway wrote a piece for Esquire in which he described the arduous attempt of a Cuban fisherman, tugged into the sweeping deep sea waters, to haul in a giant marlin he had snagged. After great effort, delirious, and disoriented, the fisherman sails into the harbor with the gigantic skeletal, wasted-away, shark-scarfed-down marlin. Based on this narrative, Hemingway published his opus The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a bittersweet award that was followed by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Hemingway introduces us to Santiago, the novella’s protagonist thusly: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff. … The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from it reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of the scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.”
Santiago, a seasoned and aged Cuban fisherman, has had a streak of bad luck; self-doubt sets in, and he begins to feel that he is losing his touch. For 84 consecutive days Santiago has returned from his fishing trips empty handed. The serious misgivings that set in shook his world. “Age is my alarm clock, … why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?” he reflects to himself. Yet Hemingway tells us that “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and cheerful and undefeated.” Santiago’s final triumph, his crowning heroic quest, begins on day 85 when he ventures into the deep waters and pushes the nautical limits of his tiny skiff. He soon encounters an assortment of aquatic life and diverse birds with which he develops affinities. Santiago tells us: “My choice [is] to go there to find him beyond all people. Beyond all people of the world.” Soon an inordinately powerful tug on his line awakens him from his reflective reveries and he realizes that this was no ordinary tautness. So strong was the pulsating reverberation transmitted through the fishing line that Santiago realizes that this was no commonplace rush. Rather, this was an “aortic spasm of epic proportions, a heartbeat like none he had experienced before.” Santiago reflects the following: “Now we are joined together and have been since noon. And no one to help either one of us.” Realizing that this was no run-of-the-mill skirmish, Santiago musters all of his mental and physical faculties and begins to draw on a reservoir of a life-time of experiences. In an uncompromising, methodical, and stoic manner tempered by years of struggles and experiences, the protracted duel becomes a struggle in which Santiago, and, by extension, the heroic quest, transmute into a danse macabre. “Fish,” Santiago tells the invisible larger than life supernatural force, “Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?” Several pages later, Hemingway states the following: “Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive. The boy keeps me alive, he thought, I must not deceive myself too much.” And later, much like Gilgamesh, Jordan, and Henry’s self-introspection, Santiago poses the following question: “You violated your luck when you went too far.” To cross the finish line on this solo quest the hero is pitted against the marlin and the scavenging sharks, against nature (the sea, the waves, the rain, the sun, the wind), against exposure and death, and, by extension, against the doubters, and it tests the limits of his emotional, physical, and mental endurance.
Much like Enkidu’s regret at having killed the beast, Santiago, as previously cited, begins to wish he had not snagged the marlin. And, like Enkidu, Santiago was close to the natural world. “He was very fond of flying fish as they were his principal friends on the ocean. He was sorry for the birds, especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying … Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows … She [the ocean] is kind and very beautiful … when shark livers had brought money .. they spoke of el mar [as] masculine. … But the old man always thought of her as feminine. .. The moon affects her [the ocean] as it does a woman, he thought.”
In each of these works the bell rings for the protagonists. The heroes venture out into their respective worlds and are called to push the limits of human endurance by searching for meaning and affirmation. While life can be destroyed, the human spirit and soul cannot be defeated. The belly of the whale experience for each of the protagonists is a transformative experience. Gilgamesh is the better and wiser for his tribulations and travails. Jordan accepts the fact that he must die so that others may live. While Henry’s farewell to arms in the military sense allows him to reflect on the futility of war by escaping into a lover’s arms, we are left with the pangs of a surrealist solitude, that numbing pathos that portends a bleak future. And even though Santiago had, by hauling in a mere skeletal carcass, lost the battle, it is because of his indefatigable and tireless efforts against herculean odds that he won the war. His unwavering and resolute steadfastness and his heroic perserverence leave an enduring legacy, an apotheosis, that will live through the fidelity and idealism of Monolin, his young apprentice.
My experience writing this paper was a metaphorical Belly of the Whale experience, and it was just what Dr. James Holloway, my cardiologist, ordered.
The post The Theme of the Quest: Gilgamesh and Enkidu as Prototypes for Hemingway’s Robert Jordan, Frederic Henry, and Santiago appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
