summary of the story my first sea journey
Answers
He admits to his vacillation. At times he feels drawn toward the religious-humanistic faith that swimmers have a “common Maker” who has created the world with a master plan, but then the existential absurdity of his undertaking strikes him as he witnesses the many who perish as he flails on, and he suspects “that our night-sea journey is without meaning.” At this point he rejects the well-known thesis of Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that humanity in its plight is like Sisyphus: Just as Sisyphus had to keep pushing the rock up the hill throughout eternity, always to have it roll back, so must humanity struggle against life’s obstacles and find its only values and satisfactions in the struggle itself. The swimmer takes no solace in this vision of life: “Swimming itself I find at best not actively unpleasant, more often tiresome, not infrequently a torment.”
Neither is he convinced by the argument from design—that because the creation reveals design and order, there must be a designer with an ultimate goal. “If the night-sea journey has justification, it is not for us swimmers ever to discover it.” Even if there were a “Shore,” a goal, a telos, what would it be? What would we do there? He imagines it as “the blissful state of the drowned.”
The swimmer then quickly entertains some of the common options open to humankind. As for the Superman, for example, the Faustian individualist who goes his own way ruthlessly, the spermatozoan sometimes envies the forcefulness of this type and regrets his own weak vitality. The appeal, however, is short-lived: “In reasonabler moments I remind myself that it’s this very freedom and self-responsibility I reject, as more dramatically absurd, in our senseless circumstances, than tailing along in conventional fashion.” Other worldviews are rejected as they occur to him. The doctrine of survival of the fittest is “false as well as repellent,” for it makes the night-sea journey “essentially haphazard as well as murderous and unjustified.” The dandy’s argument that “You only swim once”...
Answer:
Story and theme are one and the same in this interior monologue by spermatozoan swimming toward an ovum. He announces immediately that “it’s myself I address” and that he has two aims: to “rehearse” the human condition and to disclose his “secret hope.” As he considers his existence (and humankind’s), he evaluates the various ontologies, or theories of being, that philosophers have conjured up; he meditates as well on some common, and uncommon, theodicies, or explanations of why the world is the way it is. He raises first the insoluble metaphysical conundrum represented in versions of epistemological idealism: Because one can know the world only through one’s senses, does the external world really exist? As the swimmer puts it, “Do the night, the sea, exist at all? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream?” His answer is only conditional and raises another question: “And if I am, who am I?” Is he the “Heritage”—both genetic and cultural—that he carries?
He admits to his vacillation. At times he feels drawn toward the religious-humanistic faith that swimmers have a “common Maker” who has created the world with a master plan, but then the existential absurdity of his undertaking strikes him as he witnesses the many who perish as he flails on, and he suspects “that our night-sea journey is without meaning.” At this point he rejects the well-known thesis of Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that humanity in its plight is like Sisyphus: Just as Sisyphus had to keep pushing the rock up the hill throughout eternity, always to have it roll back, so must humanity struggle against life’s obstacles and find its only values and satisfactions in the struggle itself. The swimmer takes no solace in this vision of life: “Swimming itself I find at best not actively unpleasant, more often tiresome, not infrequently a torment.”
Neither is he convinced by the argument from design—that because the creation reveals design and order, there must be a designer with an ultimate goal. “If the night-sea journey has justification, it is not for us swimmers ever to discover it.” Even if there were a “Shore,” a goal, a telos, what would it be? What would we do there? He imagines it as “the blissful state of the drowned.”
The swimmer then quickly entertains some of the common options open to humankind. As for the Superman, for example, the Faustian individualist who goes his own way ruthlessly, the spermatozoan sometimes envies forcefulness of this type and regrets his own weak vitality. The appeal, however, is short-lived: “In reasonabler moments I remind myself that it’s this very freedom and self-responsibility I reject, as more dramatically absurd, in our senseless circumstances, than tailing along in conventional fashion.” Other worldviews are rejected as they occur to him. The doctrine of survival of the fittest is “false as well as repellent,” for it makes the night-sea journey “essentially haphazard as well as murderous and unjustified.” The dandy’s argument that “You only swim once”...