"i lay down but I could not sleep". why was the narrators unable to sleep? a) it was hoy in the room b) he hadn't had symptous meal c)he was worried about his marriage d)he was afraid of sound of the rats
Answers
The narrator of the "Book of the Duchess" suffers in the opening lines from a case of head melancholy, not love-sickness. Literary parallels with French love poetry abound, but do not cogently convict the narrator of unrequited love. His symptoms are different. Although head melancholy and love melancholy share symptoms, fear and sorrow especially, the distinguishing symptoms of love melancholy-agitation about the love object, a willingness to die-are missing. Rather, the narrator profoundly fears death and possesses a causeless sorrow of mind. These symptoms mark signal developments in the pathogenesis of his ailment and account for his behavior in the Alcyone section: hilarious reaction to Morpheus is a displacement activity for a narrator trying to control his malady, assuage his fear of dying and awaken-through curative sleep-to life. Comedy is life-awakening. Because in dire need of sleep and fearful of death, the narrator reacts as he does to the Alcyone story, responding to its comedy, ignoring her death. Further, his guess that an eight-year sickness causes his melancholy is just guesswork, inflamed imagination; the phisicien is sleep. The eight-year figure, however, leads to a revised dating guess if Chaucer's poem is commemorative, not occasional: perhaps 1374, when Gaunt commissions a double tomb for himself and Blanche-eight years after Chaucer apparently married Phillipa.
Answer:
(d)
Explanation:
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