Slavery Slavery Slavery

Reading "The Slave" was a lot like reading the Bible itself in that I found it an easily boring chore unless I augmented my usual reader thought stream. Granted, Dr. Sexson remarked that "The Slave" was a page turner, I never really felt that way while reading it, I suspect because the anxiety of reading something for class has always stripped me of enjoying a work. But that's no matter. Through reading this like the bible, I appreciated the duel allegory of Slave of Heaven, Slave of Man. It seemed to parallel a lot of the stories we have read this far, wherein literary characteristics are layered in such a way to create vast swaths of intertextuality. I also was impressed by the dynamicism of Jacob, he, like Moses, seemed to have a dynamic and hero-like arc to his narrative. Starting in a pastoral life , he witnesses the horror of warfare and the contradictions of his own desires which nearly consumes his moral self , and then as he ages and loses everything from his wife to his strength, living stripped of his own will, he must draw upon an indirect source of God (storytelling) to sustain and inform him through his suffering. Not only informed by, but raised, it seems like Jacob is a reflexive entity for the book itself, as the narrative churns through its tale, the story becomes dense with meaning and characters and symbolism, gaining greater resolution as one uses it as a parallel text to their reading of the Bible.