Gilgamesh Essay - Grade: A+ PDF

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Essay about The Epic of Gilgamesh...

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In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is in constant conflict with the duality of immortality. While there stands the immortality of life the stark juxtapose to this is the immortality of fame that Gilgamesh does not initially seek out but finally ends up being content with. Gilgamesh’s initial obsession with physical immortality is an innate representation of his insecurities that stem from him being one third human. He lives his life fixated not on living and enjoying his life in the present moment but conversely he lives his life in fear of each fleeting moment that brings him closer to death and simultaneously running away from the inevitability of his death. What liberates his ignorant, incessant and pessimistic view on life is confiding in the life of another, Enkidu. Upon achieving the symbolic immortality of fame with the slaying of Humbaba and slaying Ishtar’s bull, the gods angered by Gilgamesh’s actions strike Enkidu with an illness that eventually leads to his death. This served as a painful reminder of the daunting existence of the inescapable fate all share as a part of their humanity. This especially weighs heavily on Gilgamesh as he feels undeserving of this fate being that he is two thirds divine. While grieving over his friends death he engages in a futile struggle to escape the certainty of his own death. In a symbolic sense the city of Uruk represents his people, his accomplishments, and essentially his life while his frantic journey to where Utanapishti represents his death in the sense where his pursuit of physical immortality serves as a rejection of the immortality of fame and is in turn him succumbing to his fear of death. This contrast between the city of Uruk representing his life and where Utanapishti resides representing his inescapable death is ironic in nature in the fact that while Gilgamesh comes closer to Utanapishti and simultaneously thinks he’s coming closer to immortality he’s in fact straying further away from what his life comes to hold dear which is the denizens of Uruk to which he has come to be a benevolent ruler to. However he leaves this journey returning to Uruk with a newfound sense of life and appreciation, by learning

that although his body will not last forever he will live on eternally in the meaningful connections he makes through other people and the effect he has on them. Gilgamesh’s journey for eternal life ironically meant leaving everything that gave his life meaning behind, symbolically separating what it meant to live and what it meant to merely exist. Whereas to just simply exist in life meant that life had no apparent meaning, the book equates this superficial existence to death. Gilgamesh initially at war with the two sides inside himself the divine and the mortal pursues in vain to approach the level of the divine; however, in doing so Gilgamesh realizes this is a rejection of his humanity and would consume him and cause him to fixate on material wealth instead of the experiential kind that is formed by living every day of life as a celebration of life instead of a day closer to death....