In the story, "Job" is an allusion to the character of Job in the Bible. In the Book of Job, God takes up Satan's challenge and inundates Job with great tragedy, as a means of testing his faith and loyalty. Accordingly, Job's cattle, children, and servants all fall victim to nature's wrath or the murderous intentions of marauders. In addition to all this suffering, God also plagues Job with painful sores all over his body.
In the midst of his trials, Job's three friends, Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar, visit him. They try to comfort him but only succeed in making things worse. All three agree that Job must have been guilty of enough evil in his past to have deserved such suffering. They lecture him in self-righteous indignation about wickedness, sin, and the wrath of God. In the end, Job characterizes his friends as "miserable comforters."
The biblical allusion to Job characterizes Rebekka's suffering in Chapter 7. In the chapter, Rebekka is delirious from smallpox, and she awaits the return of Florens and the blacksmith, in the hopes that the latter might save her. Meanwhile, her friends come to soothe her, but it is only her imagination: "...like all ghostly presences, they were interested only in themselves." Yet, Rebekka maintains that she welcomes the distraction of even these past spirits; she equates them with Job's friends and muses that their meaningless chatter demonstrates the "true value of Job's comforters."
Like Job's friends, the ghostly spirits in Rebekka's imagination "comfort" her. They distract her from her suffering and turn her thoughts away from herself. Like Job, Rebekka longs for God's attention and blessings again; she has no need to be reminded of her weakness, vulnerability, and ignorance. Yet, she concludes that, in the midst of her great trial, "false comfort" is better than none.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Who is the character "Job" that Rebekka references when hallucinating about the women on the ship?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment