The essence of tragedy in the book of Job and Oedipus RexIn search of the essence of tragedy, The book of Job and Oedipus Rex are central. Every new tragic protagonist is to some extent a Job or a minor Oedipus, and every new work owes an indispensable element to the Counselors and the Greek idea of ​​the chorus. it is behind Shakespeare and Milton, Melville, Dostoevski and Kafka. Its mark is on all the tragedies of alienation, from Marlowe's Faustus to Camus's Stranger, in which there is a sense of separation from a once known, normative and loved divinity or from a cosmic order or from a principle of conduct. By emphasizing dilemma, choice, soul misery, and guilt, he spiritualized Aeschylus's Promethean theme and made it more acceptable to the Christianized imagination. Operating in a dramatic context with such a wide range of moods - from pessimism and despair to bitterness, defiance and exalted intuition - he is the father of all tragedies in which the emphasis is on the internal dynamics of response of man to destiny. Oedipus emphasizes not so much man's guilt or abandonment as his inevitable fate, the harsh realities that are and always will be. The Greek tradition is less nostalgic and less visionary: the difference lies in the emphasis, not in the nature. There is little longing for a lost Golden Age, or desire for utopia, redemption, or celestial restitution. But if it highlights man's destiny, it does not deny him freedom. Dramatic action, obviously, presupposes freedom; without it no tragedy could be written. In Aeschylus' Prometheus Kratos (or Power) says, "No one is free except Zeus," but the entire work proves him wrong. Even the chorus of defenseless sea nymphs, ultimately siding with Prometheus, challenges the order of the gods. Apollo told Aeschylus' Orestes to kill his mother, but he was not forced to do so. The spirit in which he agreed to his fate (a theme that Greek tragedy emphasizes in a way that Job does not) is that of a free man who, though destined, could have retreated and not acted at all. Even Euripides, who of all the Greek tragedians had the bloodiest vision of the compulsiveness of the gods in human affairs, shows his Medea and Hippolytus as proud and determined human beings. And, as Cedric Whitman says about Oedipus' fate, the prophecy merely predicts Oedipus' future, not determines it...