Vilnius pedagogical university faculty of foreign languages department of english philology

make a whole man of you.” (The Centaur, p. 262), but George definitely declares: “I hate Nature. It reminds me of death. All Nature means to me is garbage and confusion and the stink of skunk – brroo!” (The Centaur, p. 262) At the point when Peter’s grandfather says: “Nature […] is like a mother; she com-forts and chas-tises with the same hand” (The Centaur,
p. 263), Cassie is finally defeated and Peter is explicitly content with this fact: “I was glad she had been defeated, for the thought of my father as farmer frightened me. It would sink me too into the soil.” (The Centaur, p. 263)
Hence, Vargo concludes that Caldwell and his son, in Updike’s own terms, flee from the world of feminine earth and immerse into a world of masculine mind and spirit. Again, prima facie simple earthly things evolve in a sacral atmosphere.
One more element replete with meaning and significance is the sky. Innumerable descriptions present different states and moods of the sky hovering over Olinger. However, the sky implicates more than it seems at first sight: “The sky shows itself to be infinite, transcendent. It is pre-eminently the ‘wholly other’ than the little represented by man and his environment.” (Quoted by Vargo, p. 91)
The very first pages of the novel prove that the sky (as the manifestation of the transcendent) affects Caldwell. As he walks to the Hummel’s garage to have the arrow removed from his ankle, “The clear blue of the towering sky seemed forceful yet enigmatic. […] Outdoors, in the face of spatial grandeur, his pain seemed abashed.” (The Centaur, p. 9) Afterwards, before re-entering the school, Caldwell “Before entering, he gasped fresh air and stared sharply upward, as if in answer to a shout. Beyond the edge of the orange wall the adamantine blue zenith pronounced its unceasing monosyllable: I.” (The Centaur, p. 21) According to Vargo, in general, Caldwell views the sky as the source of the thunder, the lodgment of the terrible Zeus-Zimmerman. The threat of this God’s punishment breaks off his seduction by Venus-Vera. Similarly, when the teacher accidentally catches Herzog leaving the principal’s office with her lipstick smeared, he feels in the sullen sky the oppression of his hastening fate. Taking into consideration that the sky symbolizes heaven it may be concluded that Caldwell “is weighed down with a sense of estrangement even from the elements of heaven.” (Rainstorms and Fire, p. 91)
When it begins to snow between basketball games, the reader gets the feeling that all the people of Olinger are united with the sky: “Snow puts us with Jupiter Pluvius among the clouds” (The Centaur, p. 215). When Caldwell and his son are driving home through the storm, Peter’s observations of the snowflakes lead him to cosmic thoughts: “It fascinates him; he feels the universe in all its plastic and endlessly variable beauty pinned, stretched, crucified like a butterfly upon a frame of unvarying geometrical truth.” (The Centaur, p. 231)
Further on Peter starts thinking about the stars and, finally, his mind reaches an “infinite and small universe [which] both ends and does not end.” (The Centaur, p. 231) These thoughts make him contemplate life after death; and, “like practically all of Updike’s characters, Peter feels the dipolar attractions of life. In his mind he moves back and forth over the mysterious boundary called death.” (Rainstorms and fire, p. 92)
It is symbolic that in the last two chapters of The Centaur the descriptions of the sky become very frequent: “the salmon flush of the sky” (p. 255), “an indigo sky” (p. 256), “in a sky still too bright” (p. 256), “There was a star before us, one, low in the sky and so brilliant its white light seemed warm.” (p. 256), “the cobalt dome was swept clean of marble flakes” (p. 257), “steep smooth dome that capped a space of Pennsylvania a hundred miles wide” (p. 257), “the blank blue of the sky” (p. 264), “Was the dome bronze or iron?” (p. 265), “Sky, emasculate, had flung himself far off raging in pain and left his progeny upon a white waste that stretched its arms from sunrise to sunset.” (p. 266), “the sky of his father’s God” (p. 267). The centaur is gradually approaching death, thus he is drawing near the sky and, consequently, near heaven.
Finally, at the end of the last chapter, Caldwell-Chiron comes to the edge of the abyss and casts his eyes “to the dome of blue” (The Centaur, p. 269), after what the sky accepts him and sets him among the stars. In this final episode the sky is also present for it carries a great cosmological meaning of heaven.
Notwithstanding, apart from the real items gaining extra-meaning and significance, the novel also contains elements of the “invisibilia” (Vargo), which similarly obtain the features of the cosmological dimension. One of the major invisibilia images present in The Centaur is time. Throughout the book both Caldwell and Peter are preoccupied with the thoughts about time – its loss in the past, its flow in the present, and its hope in the future. Closely intertwined and almost inseparable from time there exists another invisibilia – death. The three days in the lives of Caldwell and his son make them aware of the great power of time, of the possibility that “time constitutes man’s deepest existential dimension; it is linked to his own life, hence it has a beginning and an end, which is death, the annihilation of his life.” (Quoted by Vargo, pp. 92-93) Peter and his father believe in the “reversibility” of time and in “eternal mythical present” (Rainstorms and Fire, p. 93). For that reason, for instance, George Caldwell reconstructs his life in terms of the Greek mythology, as he feels estranged from his environment. Likewise, Peter converses his memories into myth.
Caldwell’s contemplations about time reflect in his desire to grasp the meaning of the proverb “Time and tide for no man wait”, which is repeated manifold throughout the novel. This proverb seems quite odd for him, because he believes that “God made Man as the last