Vilnius pedagogical university faculty of foreign languages department of english philology

With a nervous glance at Vera, who has turned her head and might slip from his side, March asks, ‘Oh. What about?’ ‘Everything. The works. I can’t make it add and I’d be grateful for your viewpoint.’ Now March’s glance travels everywhere but into the face opposite him as he looks through the crowd for some rescue from this tousled tall maniac. […] In his anxiety and anger and embarrassment March reaches sideways and almost seizes Vera bodily to keep her with him during this preposterous interruption. […] March’s grey eyes are exploding with pain and irritation as the danger of Vera’s leaving him grows. (The Centaur, pp. 227-228)

Nobody can listen to George Caldwell; nobody can hear what he is saying and help him. The result of the talk with the priest is the following:

Heavy and giddy with his own death, sluggish and diaphanous like some transparent predator who trails his poisoned tentacles through the adamantine pressures of the oceanic depths, he moves along behind the backs of spectators and searches the crowd for the sight of his son. […] Humanity, which has so long entranced him, disgusts him packed and tangled like germs in this overheated auditorium. Even Cassie’s empty land by contrast would look good. (The Centaur, p. 229)

March is one of the modern priests who know that church is a hollow building and that faith does not live there:

By his path he hoped to escape questions he could not answer. So it proved […] He discovered, scraping away the rubble, his mother’s faith, strange of shape but undeniable, like a splash of cooled slag. He was alive. Life is a hell but a glorious hell.” (The Centaur, pp. 211-212)

For March church is an ordinary office, all he does is a bare citing of the Bible. He could have never cured Caldwell’s sick soul: “Though his faith is intact and as infrangible as metal, it is also like metal dead.” (The Centaur, p. 214)

Despite all these attacks of meaninglessness of life and its absurdity, Updike’s characters do not dissolve in them. What helps George Caldwell and leads him through his difficult life is goodness. However, it is dangerous to be good and kind in the world of the wolfish laws. Peter’s fears have come true; his father is doomed to death, for he is helplessly kind, powerless and miserable. There is one more character in the novel whose goodness brings him death – the porter of the hotel who let Peter and George Caldwell stay for free. The next morning the porter is suddenly found dead: not a single good deed is left without punishment.
However, doomed and miserable Caldwell grows and becomes more significant with every following page of the novel while his ugly cap reaches the archer in the sky. This happens because he lives according to the commandments of God, he loves every single person whom he meets on his way and does not grade people according to their status and wealth. He is a modern Chiron and Christ – his eternal goodness separates him from the miserable world surrounding him. The mythological motif endowed with truly Christian meaning exalts the figure of the Olinger schoolteacher and raises him above everything.
As J. A. Ward writes, the mythological motif in The Centaur enables the author to express “the preternatural view of the actual” (Quoted by Vargo, p. 82). It eliminates the temporal and spatial plane of the book and hereby the events obtain the coating of significance. The author takes the readers “beyond the confines of the immediate” (Rainstorms
and Fire, p. 82); he emphasizes the gravity of Caldwell’s situation, the importance of his sacrifice.
The theme of sacrifice appears at the very beginning of the novel. While presenting to his students the first organisms which appeared on the Earth Caldwell says: