Vilnius pedagogical university faculty of foreign languages department of english philology

This is the kind of thing […] that’s been happening to me all my life. I’m sorry you got involved in it. I don’t know why the damn car does not move. Same reason the swimming team doesn’t win, I suppose.” (The Centaur, p. 137)

He does not belong to the world he lives in, he is different, he is “literally invisible” (The Centaur, p. 139) to the rich and prosperous people living in Olinger. Caldwell talks about people of that kind in the following way: “A man like that would walk over your dead body to grab a nickel. That’s the kind of bastard I’ve done business with all my life.” (The Centaur, p. 153)

Caldwell never had enough money: “You and I are penniless orphans” – he says to Peter. (The Centaur, p. 134) He with his family lives in the house which is “a half-improved farmhouse. The upstairs was unheated.” (The Centaur, p. 50); a “primitive place” as Peter himself calls it. The kitchen was simply “the narrow space” (The Centaur, p. 56), an “improvised corner” (The Centaur, p. 246). After spending a night in Vera Hummel’s house, Peter remarks: “That surely was the difference between these Olinger homes and my own; they were able to keep bananas on hand. In Firetown, on the rare times my father thought to buy them, they went from green to rotten without a skip.” (The Centaur, p. 247) At the present moment, working as a teacher and earning the money which is not nearly enough to feed and enrobe himself, his son, his wife and his father-in-law, Caldwell is constrained to borrow from the school athletic funds. At the very end of the novel Caldwell-Chiron thinks: “Poor kid [Peter], needed everything. Poverty. His inheritance, deskful of debts and a Bible, he was passing it on.” (The Centaur, p. 266)
Thus, as it becomes obvious from all the examples illustrating Caldwell’s environment, his life is extremely difficult, sometimes almost unbearable, due to all the misfortunes, poverty, endless pain, people’s indifference and lack of hope. However, against this dark background of his life he stands as a figure deserving great respect and adoration. The reason for that is that Caldwell remains a real human under any circumstances. Life tests him, it brings about new challenges, pits him against new problems; but he comes through and does not lose his main and precious treasure – his goodness and love. As before, he loves more those people who suffer: the poor hitchhiker, the drunk, the old clerk working in the “flea bag”.
The myth, intertwining with reality, teaches The Centaur’s readers to remain human despite any unexpected and uncongenial turns of their fates. Moreover, the reader, comparing the real world with the divine one, realizes that the material aspects of human life are not worth sacrificing one’s life for them. Money cannot be the purpose of life and Caldwell understands it clearly. Throughout the novel Updike emphasizes that material world is alien to his protagonist: “material things meant little to him [Caldwell]” (The Centaur, p. 67). He even does not like his own body, as it also reminds him of the fact that it is material: “I hate the damn ugly thing. I don’t know how the hell it got me through fifty years.” (The Centaur, p. 118)
The pedagogical function of myth serves to emphasize Caldwell’s interest in universal immaterial aspects of life. He is not concerned with his own being; all that matters for him is his inner world and other people. Despite the fact that the obituary presented in the novel is written in an ironical mood, it comprises the sentence which best explains Caldwell’s character: “What endures, perhaps, most indelibly in the minds of his ex-students […] was his more-than-human selflessness, a total concern for the world at large which left him, perhaps, too little margin for self-indulgence and satisfied repose.” (The Centaur, p. 159)
The Chiron myth describing the centaur’s sacrifice for Prometheus demonstrates that everybody’s life must have a purpose. In contemporary America money is widely treated as a kind of purpose of life, however, money should be merely a means. Updike regrets that American society worships material wealth and transfers it into the state of highest achievements. A “material hymn to material creation” (The Centaur, p. 13) is seen everywhere around; and “everything mass-produced. Waste. If one wears out, get another. Biff. Bang. Smash ‘em up.” (The Centaur, p. 20) By purpose the ancient Greeks meant the highest values of humanity – goodness, love, and sacrifice.
Caldwell’s life is purposeful because he is not one of the Americans who make their pile and do not care about anything else in their lives. The purpose of his life embraces his
great sacrifice on behalf of his family. The real world is too narrow, spoiled and ferocious for him. David Galloway writes: