BklynMagus wrote:
>
> Dear List:
>
> Carroll writes:
>
> > Nothing, not anything, in prose or verse, is the equal of the Iliad.
>
> Huh?
>
> I read your posts and Achilles is not the only character to know he
> is going to die.
>
> Samuel Beckett's characters know they are going to die. That is the
> fun of reading Beckett.
Yes. But Beckett's characters are comic not tragic heroes. (That's nothing against Beckett -- it is arguable that comedy is a more important genre than tragedy.) And Achilles' tragedy is not his own death -- which is a given -- but the death of Patroklus. That is the tragic destiny imposed on him by the gods,* and through the bearing of which he enacts the superiority of mortals to immortals. That is also what makes the Iliad more interesting than Dante. (*We are to take Agamemnon seriously when, in his reconciliation with Achilles, he declares that the gods made him do it. The whole action, in fact, is staged by the gods for their entertainment, and there are hints in _Paradise Lost_ that Milton was fighting a temptation to echo that indictment. Or so Empson, interestingly, argues.)
It's been decades since I read Beckett's novels, so I can't cite detail -- but would it be possible to see Beckett as having written the comic epic to replace the lost comic epic composed, according to ancient legend, by Homer?
Carrol