The Reconfiguration of Sisyphean Myth in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Akwanya’s Orimili

Greg Omeje,Chibuzo Onunkwo

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.8n.6p.86

Greg Omeje, Chibuzo Onunkwo

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.8n.6p.86

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Abstract

A literary work fascinates scholars and critics in different ways which may be based on literary experience or interest. In whichever perspective, literature engages the mind with multiplicity of interpretations. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Akwanya’s Orimili have been studied in varied ways but no study, as far as this research is concerned, has looked at either or both texts from the view of configuration of the myth of Sisyphus. Here is a reading that intends to look at the mythic patterns in the two works with respect to the characters of Santiago and Ekwenze Orimili, the protagonists. In the study, attempt is made to define the Sisyphean features, and establish how the patterns are configured in the two texts. The study uses the tool of archetypal criticism, from the perspectives of Northrop Frye, to examine these similar discursive formations in the texts. The study establishes that mythic thinking gives literature rootedness in tradition, and universal appeal.

Highlights

The existence of various perspectives on and orientations to the study of literary texts reinforces Northrop Frye’s teaching that literature is ‘an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries’ (Anatomy 17)
Scholars and literary critics have studied the two literary texts in varied ways, but none has studied either or both in this direction which is an insight from mythic ideation.The formerhas been analyzed from the angle of existentialism
Absurdity is another noticeable feature of the Sisyphean figure, and remains a running pattern in a literary work of art that may be read in the light of the myth of Sisyphus.This feature questions the essence of human struggles that will eventually end in failures

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The existence of various perspectives on and orientations to the study of literary texts reinforces Northrop Frye’s teaching that literature is ‘an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries’ (Anatomy 17) It is against this background that the present study makes its contribution to scholarship in the light of the reconfiguration of Sisyphean myth in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and AmechiAkwanya’sOrimili. Archetypal criticism is chosen to account for the similarity in the running patterns of the Sisyphean myth in the two texts This theory connects the novels to literary tradition, and validates the view that a literary work is as old as humanity and announces its presence in different forms which can be in lyric, in narrative or in drama; there is something archaic about art whether in the genus of literature or music or painting or sculpture, etc. This research engages thought from the view of the myth of Sisyphus, and its patterns of identification using the aforementioned literary works

THE RECONFIGURATION OF SISYPHEAN MYTH

The Absurd Situation

Desire and Anguish

CONCLUSION