ellauri077.html on line 879: Why is it that the Oedipus has a bigger head than is healthy for him? Why seeing him makes me like a vaccinated cell seeing a virus that I am vaccinated against, but still claustrophobic. I must put my fatherly upper jaw on his head, like the male lion does to the mare, and like a snakely Laertes slip my lower jaw under his pimply chin and swallow. The problem is I cannot do it: he is not my own son, but the son of my wife, and that would be murder. So I just keep my upper jaw symbolically and quietly on his crown like a crown. and suffer this corona. My vaccination took a year of pain, and this is just a chimera of that constant pain.
ellauri140.html on line 78: Archipelago M-, an evil sorcerer who is sent to stop the knights in the service of the Faerie Queene. Of the knights, Archimago hates Redcrosse most of all, hence he is symbolically the nemesis of England.
ellauri151.html on line 685: communication as a counter-model for religious language and uses it to criticize Frazer’s attempts to debunk religion. Religious rituals must be understood as expressive communication. Magic, religion and language are based on symbolism, as the harmony of language and reality takes place in the symbol. A religious ritual like a rain-dance symbolically represents and mythologically enacts the connection between a wish and its fulfillment, and Wittgenstein mentions sacraments like baptism in this context (RF: 125). All language is similarly symbolic and ceremonial at its core and cannot be separated from mythology.
ellauri222.html on line 763: This grooming of the self paradoxically requires looking out for number 1. Nowhere is this fact more vividly portrayed than in Henderson the Rain King. Driven in the beginning by a relentless inner voice that repeats, "I want! I want!," Henderson's egoistic absorption in his material success ironically alienates him from himself. Hitching his family to seek fundamental truths in the wilderness of Africa, he discovers the arse loving relationship that men need with nature and with each other and symbolically surrenders his self by accepting responsibility for a lion cub and an orphan child.
ellauri222.html on line 767: In their quest to find the beaver that gives meaning to life, Bellow's protagonists must also come to terms with death. The message Bellow conveys in almost all of his novels is that one must fear death to know the meaning of life and what it means to be human. Henderson overcomes his fear of death when he is buried and symbolically resurrected in the African king Dahfu's experiment. Similarly, in Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm confronts death in a symbolic drowning. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift echoes Whitman in viewing death as the essential question, pointing out that it is only through death that Sauls can complete the cycle of life by liberating self from the body. Bellow's meditations on death darken in Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December. While the title character in Mr. Sammler's Planet eagerly awaits the death of the person he most values in the world, Bellow contemplates the approaching death of Western culture at the hands of those who have abandoned humanistic values. The Dean's December presents an apocalyptic vision of urban decay in a Chicago totally lacking the comic touches that soften Charlie Citrone's portrait of this same city as a "moronic inferno" in Humboldt's Gift. An uncharacteristically bleak yarn from he old standup comic. With More Die of Heartbreak and the recent novellas, however, Bellow returns to his more characteristic blend of pathos and farce in contemplating the relationship between life and death. In the recent Ravelstein, Bellow once again charts this essential confrontation when Saul recounts not only his best friend's death from AIDS but also his own near-death experience from food poisoning. Through this foreground, in a fictionalized memoir to his own gay friend Allan Bloom, Bellow reveals the resilient love and tenderness that offer the modern world its saving grace.
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