Welcome to my blog for World Literature! In case you were wondering about the title of my blog, I have been watching a lot of "Community" on hulu lately, and every episode is titled like a college class. So I tried to think about what they would call the class. If any of you haven't seen Community though, I highly recommend it, and personally guarantee that about 9.5% of you will love it! You might have noticed already that I have an interesting (see: different) sense of humor. It's an acquired taste that's usually geared more towards first-person audiences. But I digress...
This week, we read the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it was actually a very easy read! The main themes of the story were about friendship and the fear of mortality. Gilgamesh, in the beginning, is a very nasty ruler, and abuses his subservient people. The most prevalent example of this is that he has first rites to every bride after a marriage. So after the people prayed for peace, the gods asked Aruru, who created the human race, to make one that was equal to Gilgamesh. This is where symbolism might have been introduced. It was mentioned by one of my classmates that, perhaps, Enkidu, who was the one that Aruru created, may have been Gilgamesh's conscience. I hadn't thought about it, but there is a lot of argument for that theory. Enkidu is exactly opposite from Gilgamesh in almost every way except physical strength. Gilgamesh is allegedly very handsome, kingly, whereas Enkidu was wild, with shaggy hair and "knew neither people nor inhabited land." Freud argued that we have three consciences; our ego, our superego, and our id. The 'ego' is the balance between our id (conscienceness of self) and superego (conscienceness of others). The interesting thing is that, as far as I could tell, Gilgamesh and Enkidu do not do anything separately from the time that they are introduced, to when Enkidu dies. At that time, Gilgamesh is humbled and, for the first time, outwardly displays a fear of death. Perhaps Enkidu's death was the symbolic death of Gilgamesh's superego, and the new Gilgamesh was the new, balanced ego. It's a stretch, I know, I'm just trying to support an interesting perspective.
One of the things that I was very surprised with in the book was the use of irony. When Gilgamesh goes to Ur-Shanabi to cross the sea, his temper gets the better of him, and he uses brute force to intimidate Ur-Shanabi and get him to do Gilgamesh's bidding. Then Gilgamesh finds out that the Stone Charms that he smashed were actually the secret to getting across the "waters of death". When we think of people and cultures in ancient history, we usually think of them as primitive and inferior, and that we have grown exponentially in every way. I think irony is one of the most useful and effective literary tools in modern storytelling, and to see that they used it 3,500 years ago was very eye-opening.
Well, that does it for my inaugural post! Hope you enjoyed it (or are at least awake still), and, until next time...Troy and Ahbed in the Moooorrrrrrning! (watch Community, you'll get it)
