of community. The relation between individual and
community has to be one that is oriented toward the
common good but still gives the individual space to
exercise his or her own free will.
The conflict between individual and the com-
munity is a common theme in literature and focuses
on opposing forces, society, history, and the com-
munity at odds with individual subjectivity, desire,
and will. In classical Greek drama, the community
appears in the guise of the chorus of townspeople
articulating the voice of common sense and reason.
Whether it is the group of elders in Sophocles’
oedipus the kinG who preach temperance and
moderation to the hotheaded and arrogant Oedi-
pus or the chorus of women in Euripides’ Medea
who call upon her maternal instincts to subdue her
desire for revenge against Jason, they both advocate
the central principle of the golden mean which was
such a cornerstone of Greek civilization. Literary
theorists such as Northrop Frye have argued that
tragedy as a form usually ends with the expulsion
or death of the overweening tragic protagonist who
threatens social norms and community well-being
through his larger-than-life desires or hubris, while
comedies end with community values being restored
through communal celebrations, such as a wedding
where the hero and heroine are finally united after
a series of obstacles. These community values are
affirmed in such works as William Shakespeare’s
tweLFth niGht and Much ado about nothinG.
Twentieth-century literature has been marked
by a critique of a postindustrial society that values
efficiency and productivity over the more personal
communal bonds. The themes of alienation and
isolation amid the impersonality of the modern
metropolis are recurrent in modernist literature and
especially resonant in the poetry of T. S. Eliot in the
figure of a much-misunderstood Alfred J. Prufrock,
who yearns to communicate his spiritual insights
but is spurned by the superficiality of society ladies
who talk of Michelangelo (see “Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock, The”). Similarly, W. H. Auden,
in his poem “The Unknown Citizen,” bemoans the
impersonal efficiency of the modern welfare state
that is technologically advanced and has statistics on
all its citizens but does not really know whether its
individuals are free or happy. The poem implies that
for the modern state, even the question of freedom
and happiness would be a quantifiable category, if it
had thought of these as important variables on which
statistics should be kept. While modernist literature’s
innovations in narrative techniques, such as stream
of consciousness, testify to the influence of Sigmund
Freud and William James in shedding new light on
human psychology and consciousness and hence
the intense focus on subjectivity, they also function
as a testament to the decline of a shared communal
framework of values that underlines the decline of
community. One could argue that the prevalence of
the third-person narrative in the 18th- and 19th-
century novel that features an all-knowing, often
judgmental narrator, who takes the reader by the
hand and guides him or her through the world of the
novel, underscores the existence of community with
its assumption of shared moral values. As the world
has become more fragmented, the narrative voice
has also become more partial, personal, and prone to
error. For instance, in Charles Dickens’ a christ-
Mas caroL, the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge
from a miserly misanthrope to one who shares in the
spirit of Christmas cheer and sharing is an assertion
of the power of community over the individual.
In more contemporary times, Raymond Carv-
er’s “Cathedral” traces the transformation of an
insecure man, jealous of his wife’s blind friend who
has come to visit them, from an alienated, some-
what misanthropic character to one who has an
epiphany about the importance of human contact
and shared community values shown in the building
of ancient cathedrals. While overweening individu-
alism threatening the stable social order and com-
munity well-being is a common theme, the obverse
is equally true as well. In Margaret Atwood’s
The handMaid’s taLe, the dystopian community
of Gilead, a totalitarian pseudo-Christian theocracy
that subjugates women in the service of the state,
is clearly an example of a community that can only
exist by annihilating individual free will and agency,
especially that of women.
Community is thus a complex concept possessing
varying ethical, political, social, psychological, and
epistemological dimensions, which finds recurrent
expression as a literary theme.20 community