EPIGRAPHS
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2.1 Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man .... only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escape.
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From Antigone, by the Attic tragedian Sophocoles (496?-406 B.C.), in the translation of Sir Richard Jebb, C.U.P., 1900 [Jakobsen, 57]. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, disobeys the explicit orders of King Creon and buries the body of her brother Polyneices. Condemned for this to be buried alive, she takes her own life before Creon can change his mind. Lowry cites, with minor inaccuracies [ll. 332-61], the second long speech of the Chorus, immediately after the forbidden burial has been discovered. The words evoke not only the tragic inevitability of the Consul's death (like Polyneices he is to remain unburied, "dinner for birds and dogs"), but also the sense of wonder and loss felt at the destruction of such a piece of work as man.
Lowry commented to Albert Erskine [UBC 2-6]: "Epigraph: the tis in the Sophocles quotation is a little gamey: I suggest – When it is hard lodging under the clear sky. This quotation is from the translation in the two volumes entitled The Whole Greek Drama, edited partly by Eugene O'Neill's son. I hope one does not need permission to use it." The epigraph is from the Antigone of Sir Richard Jebb, a standard translation in Lowry's day, included in The Complete Greek Drama in Two Volumes, ed. Whitney J. Oates & Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938).
2.2 Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad .... that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance.
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Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, or a brief Relation of the exceeding Mercy of God in Christ, to his poor Servant, John Bunyan(1666); a spiritual autobiography and homiletic narrative by John Bunyan (1628-88), relating his gradual awakening to religion. Lowry quotes from p.104 of Grace Abounding, minor inaccuracies arising because his direct source is not Bunyan but William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience [155], in a chapter appropriately entitled 'The Sick Soul' (Lowry's copy of James has this precise quotation marked off in pencil). The passage, reflecting Bunyan's worst moments of doubt and torment, anticipates Lowry's recurring images of dog and horse and neatly sums up the Consul's Faustian dilemma: his inability even to desire the salvation offered to him.
Lowry at first attributed this ["E", UBC 27-6, n.p.] to Pilgrim's Progress. The toad anticipates the Consul's vision of himself and Yvonne in Tlaxcala, "happy as toads in a thunderstorm" [see #302.1].
2.3 Wer immer strebend sich bemüht .... him we can save.
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From the second part of Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Faust, a dramatic poem in two parts (the first published in 1808, the second in 1832), deals with the attempt by Mephistopheles to effect the ruination of Faust's soul. Disillusioned by the world and philosophy, Faust enters into a compact with Mephistopheles to become the latter's servant should he ever admit to being satisfied, and Part I concerns the attempts to satisfy Faust, culminating in the seduction of Margarete, her death, and her salvation.
Part II is complex and obscurely symbolic. The first portion concerns Faust's ardent pursuit of Helen of Troy and her final separation from him; the second portion shows the purified Faust pursuing the service of a man and, with the aid of Mephistopheles, reclaiming from the sea a stretch of submerged land. Finally, conscious of good work done, the now blind Faust calls upon the fleeting moment to stay and falls down dead. Hell tries to seize his soul, but angels bear it away.
These lines [2.11936-37], uttered by an angel bearing the immortal part of Faust upwards, epitomise the striving associated with the Faustian figures created by Goethe and Marlowe and imply that Lowry's Consul is not unworthy of their company. Lowry mentioned "the battering the human spirit takes (doubtless because it is overreaching itself) in its ascent towards its true purpose" ['LJC', 63] and suggests that there is "a hint of redemption for the poor old Consul at the end, who realizes that he is after all part of humanity" ['LJC', 85].