Sing To the Skies!

Art delves into the human psyche, and depicts the landscape in which man navigates his goals and movements. In this manner, every story is essentially a varied scope of David and Goliath. We enjoy fantasizing about the 1 in 100 chance that David beats Goliath, thus delivering to us our messiah: the ideal psyche. An idealistic hero or heroine is the main driving force for a novel to portray such divine contemplation, which actually leads me to my next and final conclusion.

A story’s main premise is the death of the main character.

We see this phenomena in The Alchemist by Pablo Coelho and Oedipus Rex by Sophocles; a supposedly “tragic” fate is necessary for the hero to become something more. Such a glorious end is portrayed with song and lyricism, although not through the methods that a surface level analysis would delve into.

|218 Tell me now you Muses dwelling on Olympus, 

|219 who was the first

to come up and face Agamemnon, 

|220 either among the Trojans or

among their famous allies? 

|221 It was Iphidamas son of Antenor, a man

both good and great, 

|222 who was raised in fertile Thrace the mother

of sheep. 

|223 Kissēs in his own house raised him when he was little. 

|224 Kissēs was his mother’s father, father to Theano, the one with the fair

cheeks. 

|225 When he [= Iphidamas] reached the stage of adolescence,

which brings luminous glory, 

|226 he [= Kissēs] wanted to keep him at

home and to give him his own daughter in marriage, 

|227 but as soon

as he [= Iphidamas] had married, he left the bride chamber and went

off seeking the kleos of the Achaeans 

|228 along with twelve curved ships

that followed him.

-Iliad XI 218–228

This excerpt was taken from the Iliad, the song of Troy. As juxtaposed with Oedipus, both stories talk about their protagonists in a tragic, but aggrandized sense. Achilles is seen as a man who was about to have it all, yet decided to go to war to gain eternal glory, and Oedipus is also considered one of those men who bore such a horrible burden, and died in order to maintain his glory.

So then what makes death such a captivating factor? Villains die all the time and we cheer as an audience, so our hero doesn’t die literally, right?

Precisely. The main character must die, or at least a part of the main character integral to the story. Piranesi’s innocence, Santiago’s way of wandering. Oedipus’s vision of the world, and Achilles prowess as a warrior; these characters had such defining traits at the beginning of their selected stories, yet their narration was not written as lyric essays, but as merely documentation of a butterfly in a cocoon. Piranesi’s journal was filled with cut and dry storytelling, primarily in the descriptive aspects that focused more on the surroundings compared to its writer. Before Santiago met Fatima, he was devoid of attachment, and lived life through a shaky lens. Only once these characters molt into their ideal stages, do they become a perfect test subject for songs on ice and fire. Elements(of story and literally) are given names due to such Prometheuses, and history is made richer by humming hymns on such gratuitous sacrifice. So much more could be said about how the main character doesn’t literally die, but “literarily” dies.

Another point in question is the understanding of death in literary works. As mortals, our only known limitation(as of current) is death, and so we have come to conclude that there is no greater barrier between the soul and the body, no greater struggle inwards of man’s conscious, than death. In fact that is why Santiago’s rebirth could be seen as violating the reader’s wants and desires. We were able to see the butterfly take flight, bounding into the air and starting a new day. A student of Plato would foam at the mouth on the very idea that we would see the final destination for the “hero”. Could such a corpulently satisfying ending be worthy of song and praise?  

Ultimately this can all be tuned to one main frequency, and that is that the ideal man/woman must suffer, but not just any suffering. It must be a suffering so great that it must be equivalent to death, if not death itself. After such an incident, we must see them lose what they want and instead gain something they didn’t know they needed. While their body lays dormant, their spirit must run free, but we must not see too much of their freedom. That is the classic tragedy, which is the common action flick, which is the common romance, which is the common horror. Under no circumstance must we truly feel like our ears can hear the full song. We must constantly adjust the bass, treble, and even the lyrics themselves in order for us to comprehend the existential manner in which all stories state the same proposition: man must die, so he can be born anew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWir6wUkPtw

(love is a sacrifice that only the blind will make)

Unfortunately or fortunately, we have not seen beyond the shrill scream of death, delivering to us our greatest literary accomplishments.