Fear, death, and love: a cultural semiotic view of animal symbols in Dürrenmatt’s The Dog

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Abstract Ernst Cassirer, the founder of the philosophy of culture, defined the human being as a symbolic animal, based on which he interpreted the cultural journey of humanity. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a Swiss German writer, who is renowned for his grotesque dramatic works, changed the traditional way of writing about animals. In his works, animal imagery no longer favors allegorization or writing from an ecological perspective but is endowed with the symbolic character of the human being, i.e., the complexity of human emotions is counter-viewed through the portrayal of the animal’s native emotions. In other words, the original values, logic, and norms are broken by heterogeneous species. The short story The Dog (1952) employs the perspective of a dog to analyze and deconstruct “fear” and “death,” prompting a reevaluation of the relationship between individuals and the real world for the pursuit of the authenticity and simplicity of emotions – namely, the essence of “love.”