Awareness And Others In Gilgamesh's Poems

Awareness and Others
For the Gilgamesh poet, life outside of society and the city meant life with minimal human contact. In Enkidu’s creation and discovery by the hunter, we see what the poet thinks this kind of solitude does to a man. The poet argues that interaction (or lack thereof) with a community shapes a person’s whole mindset and experience of the world, and that without society a man is not aware of himself or how he differs from others; a man outside of society does not even understand himself as a discrete person. We can see the poet’s assertion that human society is necessary to the creation of self- and other-awareness in the contrast of Enkidu and the trapper man. The poem first puts forward Enkidu’s lack of self-awareness
This sense of unconscious growth filters in through the passive voice of “is matted,” as well as the verb “bears.” Both word-choices suggest Enkidu’s passivity to the natural growth of his hair, as well as his lack of identification with his body as “his own.” There is also a suggestion of passivity in the idea that the “hair of his head grows thick” and the word “barley,” both of which create the image of a body that grows as plants grow---without knowing it. This growth that is not aware of itself comes further into focus when we compare this description with a similar portrait of Gilgamesh, whose “hair…grew thickly [as barley]” (1.60). That Enkidu’s description is in present tense emphasizes that the growth is constant and continuous, implying a plant- or animal-like (i.e. unwilled and unconscious) fecundity. The poet elides this lack of self-awareness with a lack of awareness of one’s difference from others (as he continues to do throughout the scene) when he writes that Enkidu’s locks are “like those of a woman.” Not only is Enkidu unaware of his body, he is unaware of how his body differs from and is similar to others; he is unaware of the differences between men and women, and even of his role as a
He does not sequence his life in a narrative, and the poem suggests that socialized humans narrate in linear time by switching back to past tense and a feeling of ordered chronology when the trapper man discovers Enkidu. The poet stresses the trapper man’s awareness of time in the lines, “one day, a second, and then a third,/he came upon him by the water-hole,” (1.120-121). This demarcation of time beside Enkidu’s ongoing, unsequenced actions shows two different modes of experience. For Enkidu, one day is much the same as any other in which he “grazes on grasses” and does other vague things, but the trapper-man experiences life as “one day, a second, and then a third.” That this awareness of the progression of days is part of the trapper man’s conception of the scene (and not Enkidu’s) is evident in the phrase “come upon him by the water-hole,” which underscores the fact that we are seeing this scene from trapper-man’s point of view. We also get this impression from the poet’s omission of whether Enkidu even sees the hunter or realizes that he is being watched. The poem links the trapper-man’s awareness of the passing of time to a consciousness of the continuity of himself and others by choosing to have the moment of Enkidu’s discovery by the trapper-man also serve as the first specific scene in which we, the readers, see him in a specific moment instead of through generalized actions. Because he has no