Eurydice Imperialism

THE COLOURS OF LIFE-EXISTENTIALISM AND THE SHORT STORY FORM:A STUDY OF SELECTED WESTERN AND AFRICAN SHORT STORIES IN GREEK MYTHOLGY, Orpheus, a bewitching minstrel whose lyre could hypnotize animate and inanimate elements at will, married a nymph, Eurydice. One day, Eurydice was bitten by a snake, and she died. In his quest to bring back the dead, Orpheus journeyed to the chthonic realm, played his lyre, hypnotised the underground deities, and secured the release of his wife. He was to return to the terrestrial world with his wife, albeit, with one proviso; that he should at no point of the journey look back whatever the distraction. He consented. With his wife following closely at his heels, they left. Close to the egress, just when they
The transmogrification of Samsa defies logic, dramatizes the helpless state of man, and the bug, an insignificant insect, becomes a microdot version of the human cosmos. This mood of total impotence in the face of cosmic dictations is further reinforced in “A Hunger Artist”, another story written by Kafka. In it, the state of man in the universe is shown as a triadic construction involving the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The image of a lone quester, the eternal seeker ignored and forgotten by the world is indicative of the author’s constant dichotomy between the real and the ideal. The story is about an unnamed man in middle-aged Europe who employed fasting as a profession, a practice which was very popular at that time. He takes delight in his profession, fasts for forty days, and is taken from town to town as an exhibitionist piece, as people pay to see and evaluate him. For forty days, he would be encaged, and throngs of people would watch him day and night to assure themselves that there was no
The announcement was received with equanimity by friends and professional associates, each of whom only ponders on how the death might affect their promotions, and each feeling that:

“It is he who is dead and not I”

Schwartz, one of the closest friends of the deceased represents life, youth and vigour, while at the same time, he reflects the nexus of apathy felt towards the victim of death by those who are not yet dead. The corpse of Ivan Ilych has a foreboding for the living. It bears an expression of reproach and warning for the living. It serves to remind them of the inevitable end. Through flashback, the life-story of Ivan Ilych was told as he advances from infanthood to adulthood, his innocuous exploits as a youth, the falsities surrounding his family life and by extension, the artificiality of Russian lifestyles, the sudden changes he experienced from friends as his state of health depreciated, and the tapering process: “There is one bright spot there at the back, at the beginning of life, and afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker and proceeds more and more rapidly-in inverse ratio to the square of the distance from