Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared, will I cream? Having eithered, will I or? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw?
Poor Mr. Haecker, he must wait to learn my opinion (wait, wretched soul, for Judgment Day, I fear), but not you, reader. Suicide was my answer; my answer was suicide .
Unless a man subscribes to some religion that doesn't allow it, then the question of whether or not to commit suicide is the very first question he has to answer before he can work things out for himself. This applies only to people who want to live rationally, of course--who want to work out an ethics for themselves.
Hamlet's question is, absolutely, meaningless.Barth begins with a hugely startling premise--The Floating Opera is a man determined to commit suicide's explanation why he is still alive. Alone, this would probably have caught me, but Barth takes it a step further, and walks out into the entire world, challenging the lunatic faith we have that we will be here in the next year, next week, next minute, to finish this piece.
Barth's narrator, Todd Andrews is diagnosed with a heart condition the result of which is that he could drop dead at any moment, maybe now, maybe tomorrow, maybe never.
With much fatalistic pondering, Todd totters about in a world that will shock you with it distinctly modern air, though it was published in 1953. As a whole, The Floating Opera is nothing less than a philosophical treatise asking one of the great questions: is their something in life worth living for?
Barth's relies heavily on allusions--particularly to antiquity and Shakespeare (who can resist?) and for book that tells you at the outset how it's going to end, carries a heavy amount of tension. Another admirable point of Barth's writing is the logical precision of his plot. You can bet your socks everything is consistent...think about this and think about it again once you've finished the Opera.
And Barth must also be credited for his skill in the many perceptive asides his narrator takes the time to dress his reader's ears with. For instance: "Olfactory pleasure being no more absolute than any other kinds of pleasures, one would do well to outgrow conventional odor-judgments, for a vast number of worth-while smells await the unbiased nose. It is a meager standard that will call perverse that seeker of wisdom who, his toenails picked, must sniff his fingers in secret joy." The man who has honesty to recognize this, the wit to so eloquently phrase it, and the balls to shout it out, is surely a man who can write a book worth reading.
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