By Benjamin Newman
In Hamlet and the Snowman, own reflections of the writer are joined with literary feedback in a typical activity – a seek to reach at imaginative and prescient and that means in existence and literature. during that attempt, literary classics via Anderson, Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Becket are analyzed, and the findings are evaluated in the framework of Newman's own reflections. the quest, taken step-by-step, slowly results in these primary components that make up one's imaginative and prescient of lifestyles and its that means in addition to popularity in their universality and similarities in either existence and literature.
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Additional info for Hamlet and the Snowman: Reflections on Vision and Meaning in Life and Literature
Example text
The cistern is like the river of death, the very fact of it, while the black wall is the “everlasting” state of what lies beyond the moat, about which nothing is known or can be said. It takes us back to the beginning where the incoming light from the shaft was the birth of life, and its white wall the lifeless state that preceded it. The lawyer’s office thus starts with life; the living walk through its rooms and then pass out at the other end. Melville has indeed marked out the boundaries. Before life there is nothing, as there is nothing after it.
Its meaning is clear and we have already spoken of it. But it carries too a dreadful message of despair for the narrator to whom it is also addressed—I know who you are, all of you, someone just like me, even the seemingly strongest and biggest, you can do nothing to extricate me or anybody else, we are all in the same place and I know where we are. The duality continues with “and so I left him”; both leaving, the lawyer, now chastened, who had indeed helped to bring Bartleby there, and the other, who knows the place well, but is powerless to help.
There is no logic to existence. And furthermore, the not particular conveys the additional insight that existence is not a particularity that can be identified and dealt with, nor is it an abstraction, but something that has never existed itself although it hangs over the existence of each human being and over the totality of mankind, fixed, immovable, not particular and not caring, but doing, and waiting to do, what it does. Yes, it is here in this place, confined to us but unconfinable itself, and it will not go away.