What Are You Waiting For?

Catalog description

Waiting is an important part of all our daily lives. We wait for many things. We wait for class to begin and end. We wait for dinner, for the plane, bus, train, or subway. We wait for the weekend, for vacations, for spring, or summer or Thanksgiving or Christmas. We wait for the pandemic to end. We wait for a Covid 19 vaccination to be discovered and distributed. If one is a refugee, one waits to leave, and/or to return. Existentially among other things, we wait for change, love, truth, redemption, justice, and ultimately, we all wait for death. The theme has a long literary history with Penelope waiting for the return of Odysseus in Homer?s epic, The Odyssey. In Hebrew Scriptures we have the theme of the waiting to enter the Promised Land, and waiting for the Messiah. In modern literature, this theme of ?waiting? probably has its roots in the works of Franz Kafka, and in particular in the novel, The Trial, one of his greatest works, but also in The Castle. Kafka?s gift for ambiguity allows this work and this waiting to be read in many different ways. A number of the Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges?, short stories deal with this theme as well. Samuel Beckett?s play Waiting for Godot, thrusts the theme on the audience or the reader and forces them to confront the potential absurdity of life. In an interview, Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel Prize winning author, acknowledged that when he read Kafka, he decided he wanted to be a writer. This waiting theme proves important to Garcîa Márquez, as well. and is very prominent in his novels such as El coronel no tiene quien le escribe, (No One Writes to the Colonel) and El amor en los tiempos de cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera). Elie Wiesel, in a short story about the Holocaust written in French, also addresses a Jewish (and perhaps Christian) perspective on this theme in ?An Evening Guest.? While Kafka…