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The Doloriad - Question 4 - The Aquinas Show
The author seemingly has a reason for this show's existence throughout the story. At times it seemed hard (for me anyways) to separate out when the show and the rest of the story were distinct. What was the purpose of this aspect of the story? the absurdist aspects of it seemed to be a litte bit at odds with the bleak nature of the rest of the story. Was this intentional and if so, why?
Comments
Yes, I felt the same as you. I suppose a better executed example of something like this might be the Punch and Judy show in Riddley Walker that kept intruding into the main story, but in this case I also had a hard time distinguishing the Aquinas bits from the main story (and also there seemed to be other stories the characters shared that were not Aquinas nor the main story, but were hard to distinguish from them) so this was confusing for me. And the Aquinas reference (and the sheep) went over my head. Was the sheep Agnus Dei?
Generally speaking sheep in theology are people in general - as in the Messiah line (itself from the prophet Isaiah) "all we like sheep have gone astray" and that then allows Agnus Dei as the identification of the son of God with the plight of humankind. But this seemed to be a kind of pet sheep?
The author also ran a play which was King Lear with sheep. Seems she has some sort of sheep thing going on.
Was Aquinas some sort of play on the futility of using reason? Of a day long gone? I was counting on your guys to work this out for me!