Vilnius pedagogical university faculty of foreign languages department of english philology

But Chiron did do this and Zeus seems to have accepted him as a substitute”. (p.73)

There exists another interesting interpretation of the myth about Chiron, according to which Chiron was wounded twice – the first wounding came very early in his life when he was abandoned by his parents, while his second wounding came with Hercules’s arrow. According to this interpretation, the centaur decided to sacrifice his immortality for Prometheus not because of the physical pain which was caused by the poisoned arrow, but

because of his emotional suffering which he experienced after he was abandoned by the family.
In his novel The Centaur Updike treats the mythological material quite freely. While generally the Chiron myth and the novel’s main idea coincide – Chiron (Caldwell) gives up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus (his son Peter); there are some discrepancies in several details. There are three main differences between the original myth and myth occurring in The Centaur: first, in the original myth Prometheus is not Chiron’s son; second, Hephaestus is not Chiron’s friend; third, Venus and Chiron do not have any relationship. Updike deviated from the original Greek myth because it was not his intention to re-narrate the myth, what mattered for him was its main idea – great sacrifice for other people’s sake.
One of the main distinctions between the myth proper and the myth occurring in Updike’s The Centaur is the fact that in the book Peter-Prometheus is the son of Caldwell- Chiron. The author had several reasons for altering the real myth. First, Chiron was in some ways similar to Prometheus. He was the tutor of the Gods, but at the same time he was kind with people; he taught not only medicine and astrology, but also the most difficult art of justice. Passing his immortality to Prometheus, he seemingly adopted him. Second, Prometheus was chosen by Updike to serve Peter’s role in the novel due to one more reason. It deals with Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus, who totally contrasted with him. Epimetheus was a clumsy character, even a loser. Scholars assume that primarily it was one single deity comprising opposite qualities, or divine twins who never grew apart. This might be the reason for Prometheus’s failure in deceiving Zeus, despite the fact that he was quite cunning. Consequently, Peter can be treated as a son who conceived the deed of his father too late. He needed years to realize his father’s greatness veiled by his nonentity and mediocrity. As Markish wrote, Peter was late to understand that his father’s absurd figure reached the clouds and his head with the “imbecile cap” touched the stars.
Other instances of deviations from the Greek mythology are the following: Chiron’s and Hephaestus’s (Caldwell’s and Hummel’s) friendship and the passionate scene between the centaur and Venus (Caldwell and Vera Hummel) do not exist in traditional mythology.
As for Caldwell’s and Hummel’s friendship, Updike deliberately brings these two characters into contact in The Centaur in order to emphasize the difference between them. While Caldwell is an intelligent thinking man, a teacher working at an Olinger high school, Hummel is a mechanic working together with his helpers (savage one-eyed Cyclopes) in an overcrowded chaotic garage. The author strengthens Hummel’s image by numerous descriptions of his face. At the beginning, when Caldwell enters the garage and meets his friend, Hummel’s face is “pale” (The Centaur, p. 11), “delicate grey” (The Centaur, p. 11),
and “dead-pale” (The Centaur, p. 14). However, when he starts to pull the arrow out of Caldwell’s ankle and it “slid out backwards with a slick of pain […] Hummel stood up, his face pink, scorched by fire or flushed in satisfaction.” (The Centaur, p. 15) Later, at the moment when Hummel’s and Caldwell’s conversation comes to the topic of the money and the arrow is already pulled out, Hummel’s “face had regained its grey colour, its acetylene tan; crinkled and delicate like an often-folded sheet of foil, his face became almost womanly with quiet woe” (The Centaur, p. 16) There is something animal and brutal in the changes of Hummel’s face and it brings the two characters to the opposite poles, emphasizes their differences.
Taking into consideration the discrepancies between the novel and mythology, Updike did not aim at re-narrating the Greek myth in all its details. The author used ancient mythology in order to put it at the heart of his novel, to make it its leading line, its backbone. In many ways, he succeeded, for the essence of the myth is reflected in the real characters and events and endows them with depth and significance.
As a real master of word, Updike created a complex and original structure of The Centaur. The time of the book is strictly defined – it comprises three winter days of the year 1947. However, the complexity of the novel enables the reader to travel between past and future. For example, on p. 46 Peter addresses somebody for the first time, and it becomes clear that all the narration is his remembrance of the past events: “I wake now often, beside you, with a pang of fear, after dreams that leave a sour wash of atheism in my stomach”. On
p. 55 he says: “I can still see everything. The downstairs was two long rooms, the kitchen and the living-room, connected by two doorways side by side”. Nearly all the novel is narrated by Peter, Caldwell’s son. Despite the fact that several years have passed, he still remembers everything that happened during those three days, his recollections are vivid in his mind. The obituary dedicated to Caldwell which occurs in the fifth chapter, provides the reader with some additional information about the protagonist. It elucidates that he had a rather difficult life and changed a number of jobs.
Choosing from several variations Updike decided to introduce a mythological motif in the first point of the novel, i.e. in the title. The majority of mythological novels have a mythological motif in the title; however, they may as well have some additional or altered wording (e.g. Doctor Faustus). In The Centaur, the title gives no supplementary information except of the explicit name of a mythological creature.
The next mythological implication lies in the first epigraph to the novel, which is taken from one of the works by Karl Barth. It says: “Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him. He himself is the creature on the boundary