by Chris Alexion, Copyright October 03, 2006, all rights reserved. 299 views
Okay, so it may be lame to reprint coursework on this blog, but I think this piece is relevant. It's from my final paper for Literary Roots of Western Culture, slimmed down on the Atkins diet and edited to be more blog-friendly.
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Nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky preferred to portray people in "fantastic" or crisis situations, holding that these situations reveal people's true nature more than the humdrum of daily existence. In the next few posts I'd like to look at three great works of Western literature–Job, Antigone, and Hamlet–in order to illustrate and explore Dostoevsky's statement.
Job is one of the most famous and most difficult books of the Old Testament. It arrests us with an incredible story of suffering and asks us to come to terms with God, faith, righteousness, and pain. Job's story is crisis in its most poignant form, and involves two aspects. The first aspect of Job's crisis is theological. Job's suffering is the result of a contest between God and Satan. Satan alleged that Job was only righteous because of the benefits he derived from God's favor: "Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not made a hedge around him . . .? But now, stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face!" (Job 1.9-11). Job's crisis is also theological because of its ramifications for the problem of evil. Job shows bad things happening to a good man, and involves the relationship of God to human suffering.
The second aspect of Job's crisis is experiential. The humanness of the narrative allows readers to relate it to their lives. Job's trials affect nearly every part of what makes him what he is: his accomplishments (1.15), his family (1.19), his health (2.7), and his friendships (5.1).
Though Job depresses, it also offers peace. The first way in which it does this is through Job's example. Job is human–he wavers; he doubts; he curses the day of his birth (3.1); he wishes he could take God to court (9.1-35). Yet in all this apparent wavering he remains basically steadfast. His refrain is "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; / Blessed be the name of the Lord" (1.21). He refused to curse God, even when urged to by his wife. Job realized that though his suffering was enormous, there was more to the universe than him, and he was able to turn outward and hear the words of God (spoken later in the book). Job also knew that his duty to do rightly didn't change with his circumstances; he lost control of everything around him, but he was able govern his own response.
The second way in which Job's story offers consolation is through the path of humility. When the Lord enters the discussion in chapters 38-41, Job is vindicated from his friends' charges, but also humbled before the wisdom and power of God. Job realizes that human patterns of justice do not apply in the same sense to God; one cannot accuse God without access to a law higher than the Most High–which is logically impossible. Job's ultimate solution is not that it explains everything; rather, it lays the boundaries for what humans can reasonably expect to explain (40.1-50).
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