From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Saturday, May 05, 2001 12:42 PM Twelfth post Metamorpheus: Four (part 1 of 3, probably) or A Scottish Barbarian Trashes the Greek Underworld The dream at the start of this chapter features the barbarian again. This time he's looking for Sleeping Beauty. "I luv the ded", an old man tells him when he asks where Sleeping Beauty is, and the barbarian, thinking that the guy is telling him that he's a necrophiliac, gets annoyed and slits his throat. The guy clarifies that he meant Isle of the Dead before dying. A lot of this dream is like that; violent and funny. Anyways the barbarian also has a lot of anachronistic equipment and makes jokes about modern-day things, so he's getting further away from the fairly straightforward sword-and-sorcery barbarian he was in the first dream. One of the things he has is a knife missile. Yes, a Culture-style knife missile, though later it's called a cheap copy, though it is from the future. Plus it sings these little puzzle-poems that spell out names of things; it's first one, about itself, spells out "dagger", though the barbarian, who spells phonetically, thinks its spelling is wrong and that it means daggir. A witch gave it to him; he mentions how great witches are in bed too. Anyways the barbarian gets a sorceror to conjure him to the Underworld and he proceeds to wipe out most of the well-known entities there. He didn't run into Tantalus, which is too bad, I would have thought that that encounter would have potential. Anyways, a quick rundown of the damage follows. Sisyphus: escaped from his eternal doom. The barbarian helps him roll his stone to the top of the hill in return for directions on how to cross the river, and Sisyphus wedges the stone there before pointing toward Charon and delightedly running off. Promethius: killed by liver cancer. The barbarian tries to ask him for directions, only gets Greek, and kills the eagle when it attacks him. P.'s liver is apparently used to completely regenerating every few minutes, and the eagle is no longer tearing it out and eating it, so when the barbarian passes Promethius on the way back he's dead with his liver burst out. Charon: killed by petrification. Charon asks for Cerberus' head as the price of the barbarian's passage, the barbarian says sure but loses the head and brings back Medusa's as the nearest substitute. Hey, will this one do? he asks as Charon turns to stone and smashes through the bottom of the ferry. The barbarian has to swim the Styx to get back. The knife missile starts to make a poem spelling out the name of Charon and each of the next two entities as the barbarian meets them, but the barbarian always shuts it up before it finishes. Cerberus: killed by impact. The barbarian cuts off one of Cerberus' three heads to give to Charon, but the head starts growing back. (I've never heard of Cerberus having this ability, only the Hydra.) So the barbarian tells Cerberus to fetch the stick and throws the knife missile over a cliff, Cerberus tries to get it; splat. The extra head rolls over the cliff too so the barbarian is pissed. Medusa: killed by knife missile. The barbarian bashes his head on a doorway, gets blood in his eyes and can't see much, and realizes that the knife missile is still around when it starts rhyming again. He throws it and that's it for Medusa. So the barbarian finally finds Sleeping Beauty's chamber, expecting to wake her up with something more than a kiss. (The original Sleeping Beauty story actually had Sleeping Beauty raped by the Prince; she wakes up when one of the children she's given birth to from the rape tries to suckle and accidently sucks out the poisoned needle that's keeping her asleep. The old European stories were expurgated considerably when they were written down in their current form as "fairy tales".) But it's not Sleeping Beauty, it's the guy in the hospital bed. Andrea appears on a TV screen in the wall and tells the barbarian not to kill the guy on the bed "Because he will become you; you will kill yourself and he will live again, in your body." Andrea warns him not to look at the Medusa's face and tries to tell him not to take something, but gets cut off by static. So the barbarian takes a gold frog statue sitting nearby and leaves. And as soon as he gets across the Styx (drinking some of the water, too), the gold frog turns into the familiar, who has called the barbarian there with Sleeping Beauty dream-telepathy to rescue it. The familiar makes a few remarks about the rocks looking metamorphic, not igneous, jokes about the barbarian being Orpheus, and that's it. So what does all this mean? Most is pretty good comedy, but the last two paragraphs above have lots of extra symbolic meaning. The narrator is Sleeping Beauty; he's in a coma, waiting for his beloved (Andrea) to kiss him so that he'll wake up. We already started to get the idea that this whole crash thing involved her in some way. Anyways, he's waiting for her affection before he'll make the effort to rouse himself. The bit about the barbarian killing himself and the narrator living again in his body suggests one of those near Eastern death-rebirth myths where the god is killed and reborn each year as a symbol of the harvest. At any rate I already had the barbarian figured to represent the narrator's body, as well as his class background, so this fits. Andrea's comment is still a bit confused, but maybe I'll come back to it later. It seems significant that Andrea was (probably) trying to tell him not to take the familiar back. Why? The familiar is education, in a sense -- after all it knows about rocks, just as the narrator does from his Geology courses. If the barbarian is Orpheus, then the familiar is Eurydice, and Eurydice is dead after all. The bit about the rock in the Greek Underworld looking metamorphic, not igneous, is probably a joke about the anachronisms and so on -- the place is composed of reworked, not original, material.