Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Agamemnon and the Word, Alfred Tennyson's Ulysses, Paulo Coelho's…

- - - - Returning after many years to a now grayed king and a thriving Troy, as the siege of the Greeks has halted for Agamemnon's quest, Agamemnon's council of advisors presents to him a recording, thickly-bound and exceedingly heavy, of vast content in variation and detail, the majority of its contents as entirely extraneous as Agamemnon had requested. Changing his mind at the sight of the volume's word-covered pages, Agamemnon requests his council again, honing his item of desire to a single sentence explaining the meaning behind the universe's movements and thus his own failure (although by now the Trojan war has long been concluded a draw, its armies deserted and its chief perpetrator too engrossed in his advisors' quest to notice). The crew set out again to seek the meaning of Agamemnon's faults.
        
        Returning finally past an abandoned and overgrown Troy and into an even deeper and more cavernous Mycenaean castle, the group sends forth Palamedes, one of the principal protagonists of the original iteration of Troy's events, with a dagger, containing Agamemnon's requested all-encompassing sentence. The king is silent for a deep breath and, despite his original pleasure at the sentence's awareness of joy and sorrow, birth and death, finds himself dissatisfied at the work of his court's breadth once again. He issues a final request to his loyal servants: to bring him a single word which accounts for the ticking of time, the relationship of the vines growing on the walls of the fortress of his previous wrath and the sea spray from the sea around Troy, and the flapping of a butterfly's wings on the other side of the earth, and his words carry both pleading and threat.
        
        Returning alone now, Odysseus presents himself before Agamemnon, now a yearning creature reduced to his desire to fill the lack which his self awareness has created, and presses a ring onto the king's finger. The wearer looks down and, upon reading the word inscribed into its gem, falls from his throne, dead from either the word's sating of his internal hunger for knowledge or Odysseus' unconfirmed murder of his benefactor through poison hidden within its base. The story concludes purposefully ambiguously, and Agamemnon's final thought remains painfully absent from Mason's narration.