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

The Essence of Tragedy in The Book of profession and Oedipus Rex In the search for the essence of the tragedy, The Book of Job and Oedipus Rex are central. Each new tragic protagonist is in some degree a lesser Job or Oedipus, and each new run short owes an indispensable element to the Counselors and to the classic idea of the chorus. The Book of Job, especially the Poets treatment of the suffering 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 loved deity or cosmic order or principle of conduct. In show dilemma, choice, wretchedness of soul, and guilt, it spiritualized the Promethean head 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 hopelessness to bitterness, defiance, and exalted insight---it is father to all tragedy where the stress is on the inner dynamics of mans response to destiny. Oedipus stresses not so much mans guilt or forsakeness as his ineluctable lot, the stark realities which are and always will be. The Greek tradition is less nostalgic and less visionary---the difference being in emphasis, not in kind. There is little pining for a lost Golden Age, or yearning for utopia, redemption, or heavenly restitution. But if it stresses mans fate, it does not deny him immunity. 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 whole 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in his destiny ( a theme which Greek tragedy stresse s as Job does not) is of a free man who, though fated, could have withdrawn and not acted at all.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 decisive human beings. And, as Cedric Whitman says about the fate of Oedipus, the prophecy merely predicted Oedipus future, it did not determine it.