Myth and artistic imagination in John Updike’s “The Centaur”

Abstract

This article deals with the issue of a person’s individual way and its specific features in “The Centaur” and offers a close reading of the first scene of the novel. The entire substance of the novel is the imagination of Peter Caldwell, the narrator. Peter represents himself as an artist who makes abstract paintings. He rejects the matter of life, time, and turns to the realm of pure spirit as well as to the realm of art, which, as he sees, may help him grasp eternity. He rebels against the local authorities morphed by his imagination into pagan gods. He also rebels against his own father George Caldwell, whom he constructs as the centaur Chiron. Peter involuntarily sees his father as his alter ego and ascribes to him his own internal problems. He makes an attempt to immortalize himself and to be with God. George Caldwell, in Peter’s vision, sacrifices his spiritual quest. This path of humility that Peter attributed to his father is, in fact, his own path. Peter’s imagination manifests itself not only in the way he attempts to ascribe his current spiritual search and doubts to his past and to his late father, but also in the way he presents the reality. It is rendered as an ancient myth which therefore pursues several goals. The myth gives Peter the narrator a possibility to heroize himself, to present himself as Prometheus in the absolutely non-heroic reality he finds himself in.

This preliminary approach will allow us to understand the first scene of the novel, the most complex and important in “The Centaur”, which sets the stage for the narrative and brings together all the lines of the work.