The Slave

Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Slave
Part One - Wanda
Part Two - Sarah
Part Three - The Return

The slave is about a man named Jacob, who faces multiple hardships in his life due to his Jewish faith. Four years after the Chmielnicki massacres of the seventeenth century, Jacob, a slave and a cowherd in a Polish mountain village, falls in love with a Gentile woman Wanda, his masters daughter. He finds he can't live without her and after much inner turmoil, they decide to run away together to a distant jewish community. The couple always seem to hold over them an aura of ill-fatedness, but in the end when they both die they are able to remain together. "Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided" (Singer, 311).

The title remains duplicit in meaning by refererring to Jacob not only as a slave to Jan Bzick, but a slave to his faith, religion, and God as well.




Favorite Frye Quotes

THE GREAT CODE: The Bible and Literature

"What a man essentially is is revealed in two ways: by the record of what he has done, and by what he is trying to make of himself at any given moment" (Frye, 49).

"A serious human life, no matter what 'religion' is invoked, can hardly begin until we see an element of illusion in what is really there, and something real in fantasies about what might be there instead. At that point the imaginative and the concerned begin to unite" (Frye, 50).

"Human life is a continuum that we join at birth and drop off at death. But, because we begin and end, we insist that beginnings and endings must be much more deeply built into the reality of things than the universe suggests, and we shape our myths accordingly" (Frye, 108).

"...the central metaphor underlying 'beginning' is not really birth at all. it is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being" (Frye, 108).

"What man acquires in the Fall is evidently sexual experience as we know it, and something called the knowledge of good and evil, obviously connected with sex but not otherwise explained" (Frye, 109).

"To create is to create a designed unity, with the craftsman's care in which every detail acquires a function, a distinctive relationship to a whole" (Frye,112).

"...history itself is a period of listening in the dark for guidance through the ear" (Frye, 117).

"Law is general: Wisdom begins in interpreting and commenting on law, and applying it to specific and variable situations" (Frye, 121).

"Wisdom, as noted, is not knowlege: Knowledge is of the particular and actual, and wisdom is rather a sense of the potential, of the way to deal with the kind of thing that may happen" (Frye, 123).

"Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new" (Frye, 124).

"We are all born lost in a fores: if we assume either that the forest is there or that it is not there, we shall follow the rhythm of nature and walk-enlessly in circles. The metaphor of fog or mist present in 'vanity' suggest that life is something to find a way through, and that the way of wisdom is the way out" (Frye, 124).

"The apocolypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared" (Frye, 138).

"The great religious leaders do not write: they talk" (Frye, 213).

FRYE IS AMAZING.

...Still thinking about the "apocolypse"


2012: The date of our immanent doom. People have been predicting the end of the world based on specific things from history or science, the most popular theory at the moment is that in 2012 the world will end... because the Mayan calendar says so.

The obsession has spread to consumerism. People purchase things that, in theory, they will no longer need in a couple years.

From Y2K -> Present day



Marketing via mass media and entertainment. Many box office hits are based upon the presumed end of the world. I.e. Armeggedon, Independence Day, Resident Evil, The Day After Tomorrow, Apocolypse Now, 2012, etc.


THE APOCOLYPSE









Why the human obsession with the end of the world? Is there really a question that it will end? No. The world will not sustain itself and its inhabitants forever. It's just not plausable. However, is it ending via scientific theory or the theory of a vengeful God? I would like some opinions... Thank you.

Assignment - Have A Bad Day

Dr. Sexson challenged us at the beginning of the semester to go out and have an awful day...

It wasn't purposely to make us miserable, but to help us understand what it felt like to be JOB... but in less extreme sense of the story.

I've had quite a few bad days this semester, but after having read the story I cant help but feel like I'm complaining about things that don't directly affect the rest of my life. Things that I would get over by the next day and forget within the month.

Some other people in my Bible As Literature class have not been so lucky. There have been some tough issues that many in the class have experienced this semester: loss of a family member, loss of a friend, loss of faith, etc.

I cannot retell their stories, so I recommend you read them for yourselves.




Proverbial Wisdom


A proverb is a short, popular saying, used to represent a semi-obvious trouth.


It's the kind of wisdom your grandparents bestow unto you... every single time you see them.


Example: "A watched pot never boils."


Biblical Example: "If you are wise, it is to your own advantage; if you are arrogant, you alone shall bare it." - Proverbs 9:12

Prudential Wisdom

Critical, cotemplative, speculative wisdom






Juxtapostion: Prudential: Hamlet
Proverbial: Polonius


These two characters, listed above, from Shakespeare's Hamlet provide a literary example of both types of wisdom. Hamlet is always questioning, learning, searching for meaning and gaining wisdom from such exploits. Polonius takes his point of view and does not open his eyes much to what's around him. Unlike Hamlet, he stays rather superficial causing his wisdom to only be skin deep.
Classical Music

"I have often recurred to a distinction of experience in the zrts that seems to me a genuine one. If we are listening to music on the level of say, Schumann or Tchaikovsky, we are listening to highly skillful craftsmanship by a distinguished and original composer. If then we listen to, say, the 'Kyries' of the Bach B Minor Mass or the Mozart Requiem, a certain impersonal element enters. What we hear is still "subjective" in the sense that it is obviously Bach or Mozart, and could not possibly be anyone else. At the same time there is a sense of listening to the voice of music itself" (Frye, 216).

Always a whiz with the words. Frye makes a valid point later on comparing classical literature to classical music. Hes states that each speak with the voice of their represented medium. When it's good it's because you're not hearing the author or the composer, instead you are hearing drama and music.

It seems to be a very formalist perspective, but I like the lyrical quality from which he says it.