made to understand that Harry’s flight from young
adulthood is not only futile but also destructive.
Interestingly, Updike’s three subsequent installments
of Harry’s life all find him at least one step behind
(and he dies where he essentially began—playing
basketball).
Just as striking are the sundry literary characters
whose progress through the latter stages of existence
is thwarted by magic, addiction, attachment to the
past, or a simple lack of faith. In his poem “Titho-
nus,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson memorably depicted
the story of Tithonus, Aurora’s beloved, doomed to
“wither slowly” in her arms because he cannot die.
His is the story of the dark side of immortality, of
course, the realization that our fear of death often
obscures its necessity. T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, in “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” offers the
figure of one who seeks to arrest the progress of time
by never choosing (“Do I dare?”). He grows old, but
he cannot “force the moment to its crisis”—that is,
he remains more observer than agent in his own life.
Like Tithonus, he has come to realize that there are
worse things than the surrender to the inevitable
conclusion of life—namely, that one can live out a
spiritual death of excruciating torture.
Fiction writers subsequent to the advent of
modernism at the turn of the 20th century seemed
increasingly inclined to suggest that, far from inevi-
table, progress through life necessarily involves
struggle and, ideally, a crucible or challenging ritual
that forces graduation to the next stage. Later in
the century, Leslie Marmon Silko’s cereMony^
offered the compelling portrait of Tayo, whose alco-
holism and inner turmoil keep him rooted in the
crucible of his youth, World War II. Through the
help of Betonie, the shaman, he is able to see a way
forward by accepting the crucible of the moment.
Tayo realizes “there were transitions that had to be
made in order to become whole again” (170).
Ernest Hemingway’s The oLd Man and the
sea is another example of this concept of condi-
tional stages at work. Santiago’s crucible of more
than 80 days of fishing without a catch becomes the
ultimate test of faith in himself, his traditions, his
beliefs, and his capacity for endurance. By implica-
tion, Santiago’s great struggle is the struggle we
all must face as the time of our thriving inevitably
passes, when the world is unlikely to offer much in
the way of affirmation. For Santiago, the passage
through is not a form of surrender nor, certainly,
a turning away from the moment toward fantasy.
Rather, his essence is reaffirmed by the fact of his
endurance, his ultimate landing of the great marlin.
Although the marlin is stripped of its tangible value
by sharks, Santiago’s victory is ensured by the enor-
mity of the skeleton.
In a sense, Santiago’s triumph unifies all the
stages of a life lived in obedience to a code. Ironi-
cally, had he changed with the times, he would have
negated his very existence. His ultimate test of faith
in himself comes when he has the least reason for
faith, which Hemingway strongly suggests is the
nature of life when he has Santiago tell the young
Manolin that September is the time of the great fish,
and thus “anyone can be a fisherman in May” (18).
See also Carroll, Lewis: aLice’s adventures
in wonderLand; Frost, Robert: poems; Gaines,
Ernest J.: autobioGraphy oF Miss Jane pittMan,
the; Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki: FareweLL to
Manzanar; Hurston, Zora Neale: their eyes
were watchinG God; Shakespeare, William:
teMpest, the; Shelley, Percy Bysshe: poems;
Wilder, Thornton: our town; Williams, Ten-
nessee: cat on a hot tin rooF; Wordsworth,
William: “Lines Composed a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey”; Wright, Richard: bLack boy.
FURTHER READING
Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays
1959–1987. Edited by Antony Van Couvering. San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New
York: Scribner, 1975.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. 1977. Reprint, New
York: Penguin, 2006.
Daniel Ryan Morsesuccess
What does it mean to be successful in life? Many
people would equate success with wealth, but some
wealthy people are profoundly unhappy. Others
would equate success with power or fame, which
are equally problematic. If we assume that being
successful is about attaining goals, few would pur-success 107