(no subject)
Part 1: Reflection
My fellow Thespians, it is today with a grave heart that we bid farewell to our once mighty King Oedipus. His life was riddled with tragedy, his situation bleak, but today we will not look back on his misfortune or his mistakes. No, we will look back at his reign over Thebes, and rejoice that we had the privilege of his sovereignty. Oedipus was indeed his father’s soon. His only joy was seeing his Kingdom happy. Even with his last mission, leading him to the knowledge of his past, all he wanted was his people to be content. He followed through on his promise to his people, that the murderer of our late King Laius would be shunned and exiled from Thebes. Even when it turned out that this murderer was he himself, he did not falter in his promise! We may judge his decisions as a man, as a son, or as a husband. But we dare not judge his loyalty as a King.
Part 2: Looking ahead
The extended metaphor has been present in some of the works we have had the pleasure of studying. One of the stories that stuck out to me was Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls”. There are many subtexts to Munro’s work such as symbolism and binaries, but what caught my attention most of all was the extended metaphor, established very early in the story. The very first sentence in “Boys and Girls” is “my father was a fox farmer” (218). A very simple and straightforward sentence at first glance. But once you read on and take a closer look at the story as a whole, a metaphor starts jumping off the page, and continues to grow as the story progresses. Alice Munro uses the fact that the father boards foxes as a metaphor for the environment that the daughter grows up in: where she is trained, and where she is used. Munro mentions that the foxes “were not named when they were born, but when they survived their first year’s pelting and were added to the breeding stock” (221). This is mirrored in the way the daughter is brought up. The father has no problem using her as a farm hand, a boy’s job, until she lets the horse free. Only then is she labelled a girl and used no more. The foxes are brought up continuously, throughout “Boys and Girls”, propelling the story forward and extending the metaphor to the climax. The foxes “were fed horsemeat” (224), and it is in the shooting of Flora the horse, that we come to the daughter’s main conflict in the story. Does she let the horse go? Or does she let them kill her to feed the foxes? Does she survive her first pelting of the winter, her first test? Or be named a girl? In the end the daughter fails her father- her farmer- and falls victim to being “only a girl” (231).
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My fellow Thespians, it is today with a grave heart that we bid farewell to our once mighty King Oedipus. His life was riddled with tragedy, his situation bleak, but today we will not look back on his misfortune or his mistakes. No, we will look back at his reign over Thebes, and rejoice that we had the privilege of his sovereignty. Oedipus was indeed his father’s soon. His only joy was seeing his Kingdom happy. Even with his last mission, leading him to the knowledge of his past, all he wanted was his people to be content. He followed through on his promise to his people, that the murderer of our late King Laius would be shunned and exiled from Thebes. Even when it turned out that this murderer was he himself, he did not falter in his promise! We may judge his decisions as a man, as a son, or as a husband. But we dare not judge his loyalty as a King.
Part 2: Looking ahead
The extended metaphor has been present in some of the works we have had the pleasure of studying. One of the stories that stuck out to me was Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls”. There are many subtexts to Munro’s work such as symbolism and binaries, but what caught my attention most of all was the extended metaphor, established very early in the story. The very first sentence in “Boys and Girls” is “my father was a fox farmer” (218). A very simple and straightforward sentence at first glance. But once you read on and take a closer look at the story as a whole, a metaphor starts jumping off the page, and continues to grow as the story progresses. Alice Munro uses the fact that the father boards foxes as a metaphor for the environment that the daughter grows up in: where she is trained, and where she is used. Munro mentions that the foxes “were not named when they were born, but when they survived their first year’s pelting and were added to the breeding stock” (221). This is mirrored in the way the daughter is brought up. The father has no problem using her as a farm hand, a boy’s job, until she lets the horse free. Only then is she labelled a girl and used no more. The foxes are brought up continuously, throughout “Boys and Girls”, propelling the story forward and extending the metaphor to the climax. The foxes “were fed horsemeat” (224), and it is in the shooting of Flora the horse, that we come to the daughter’s main conflict in the story. Does she let the horse go? Or does she let them kill her to feed the foxes? Does she survive her first pelting of the winter, her first test? Or be named a girl? In the end the daughter fails her father- her farmer- and falls victim to being “only a girl” (231).
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