ENG150Y1 Lecture Notes - Midlife Crisis, Metafiction, Diegesis
Document Summary
All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of don quixote l. Gilgamesh goes off on journey to discover identity. Aeneas loses life in troy and has to go off to find a new identity and people. Erec when he realizes he has not been able to reconcile identity as husband and warrior journeys off to discover identity to integrate conflicting parts of his self. Dante mid-life moral crisis of identity and despair. Don quixote a man driven to delusion by mid-life crisis: Is not an exact parallel to aforementioned heroes, of whom tragedy is never an unlikely ending (all have looming, existential crises hovering above them, which is not the situation with quixote) Rather than young, heroic at the prime or at mid-life turning point, don. Quixote is aged and has declined past his prime. His figure is old and thin, rather than brawn and primed like erec.
