ing the life span of each living thing, with man in
his greed receiving the rejected remainder from
the more humble donkey, dog, and monkey. Hence,
working is burdensome, retirement is suspicious, and
old age is foolish.
The best description in a literary masterpiece
of this tradition of inevitable progression through
stages of life is the “All the world’s a stage” mono-
logue of the cynical courtier Jaques in Shakespeare’s
as you Like it (act 2, scene 7):
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the
infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms:
Then the whining school-boy, with his
satchel
And shining morning-face, creeping like
snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a
soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the
pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in
quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation,
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the
justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age
shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too
wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly
voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything.In Edgar Allan Poe’s masterful allegory “The
Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero vainly
imagines he can first wall out and then defeat
death. The arrangement of the abbey within which
Prospero and his guests imagine themselves to be
invulnerable is symbolic and also highly evocative
of Jaques’s speech: seven rooms, each of a different
hue and thus character, each imperceptible from the
vantage point of the others.
There is a sense in which the concept of life
comprising stages is less a theme of literature
than a precondition itself, an assumed norm, and
many thematic concerns arise from the frustration,
retardation, or inhibition of the process. That is,
characters who fail to progress in a timely fashion
experience considerable turmoil and anguish due
to their unnatural state. This posits the notion that
the stages are contingent on volition, the character’s
capacity to make the proper choices or draw the cor-
rect conclusions from experience.
Consider, for instance, the number of memorable
characters who are, in essence, stuck as adolescents.
Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The catcher
in the rye is, though still young, unnaturally bent
on dividing the world into “phonies” (nearly every
adult) and those more like his sister Phoebe and late
brother Allie, whom he imagines to be uncorrupted
and static in a wholly unrealistic way. His inability to
function at a level appropriate to his age (failure at
a succession of preparatory schools, childish infatu-
ation without any overt action with Jane Gallagher,
impotent response to the prostitute Sunny) could all
be seen as inevitable consequences of his untenable
mental/emotional/spiritual stage/age (roughly 12,
instead of 16).
Similarly, though in many respects more egre-
giously, Harry Angstrom from John Updike’s
rabbit, run cannot bring himself to accept the
preconditions of life as a 26-year old husband and
father-to-be. Just as his nickname implies, he runs,
toward irresponsibility and what he imagines to be
inconsequential hedonism with a prostitute. How-
ever, as the tragedy of his denials unfolds, we are106 stages of life