What Non-Western story do you belong in?
You belong in a soul-searching quest.
What separates soul-searching from nature or adventure stories? The fact that there are no heroes or peaceful journey. Soul-searching journeys are dark and painful where the hero is a poor soul who enlightened themselves too far. There is no good or evil, lines are blurred, and tough choices must be made, most of them having dire consequences.
Dante Aligheiri's Divine Comedy starts off with Inferno; "Hell." The narrator, also named Dante, wakes up to find himself in a mysterious woods. As he descends into hell, the spirit of Virgil, an ancient poet, appears and guides Dante through the layers of hell. Dante sees many friends and foes in every layer of Hell. As he pushes forth, he begins to lose a sense of the old Dante and changes into a new man throughout the journey. At the end of Inferno, as he faces the Ultimate Evil, Dante instead climbs out of Hell rather than defeat Satan himself.
Another ancient soul-searching story would be Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In this story, a prisoner becomes unchained and frees himself into the world, emerging out of the dark cave. When the sunlight (truth) becomes too much to bear, he returns into the cave, only to realize that the shadows on the cave walls, which he believed was the real "truth" all along, were merely puppets (shadows) created by people hiding behind rocks. The prisoner thus becomes depressed. The truth can be a painful thing.
What separates soul-searching from nature or adventure stories? The fact that there are no heroes or peaceful journey. Soul-searching journeys are dark and painful where the hero is a poor soul who enlightened themselves too far. There is no good or evil, lines are blurred, and tough choices must be made, most of them having dire consequences.
Dante Aligheiri's Divine Comedy starts off with Inferno; "Hell." The narrator, also named Dante, wakes up to find himself in a mysterious woods. As he descends into hell, the spirit of Virgil, an ancient poet, appears and guides Dante through the layers of hell. Dante sees many friends and foes in every layer of Hell. As he pushes forth, he begins to lose a sense of the old Dante and changes into a new man throughout the journey. At the end of Inferno, as he faces the Ultimate Evil, Dante instead climbs out of Hell rather than defeat Satan himself.
Another ancient soul-searching story would be Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In this story, a prisoner becomes unchained and frees himself into the world, emerging out of the dark cave. When the sunlight (truth) becomes too much to bear, he returns into the cave, only to realize that the shadows on the cave walls, which he believed was the real "truth" all along, were merely puppets (shadows) created by people hiding behind rocks. The prisoner thus becomes depressed. The truth can be a painful thing.
