Physical Pain and Justice

About this book

It has been said that all great literature is about suffering. But before the twentieth century, physical pain, one of the most primal forms of human suffering, has rarely been represented on the stage and in fiction. But when it is foregrounded in works of literature, it is not only the most dramatic way of representing human suffering, it is also used to explore, in the most intense form, existential questions regarding the meaning of human existence and the justice of the universe. Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental, then, that imaginative works about physical pain, though few in number, figure prominently among the masterpieces of the western literary tradition. The best were written during two of the west's most astonishing periods of literary creativity, fifth-century-BC Athens and nineteenth-century Russia, and by the most prominent artists of their time: Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes by Sophocles; Notes from the House of the Dead by Dostoevsky; and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and War and Peace by Tolstoy. In all these works, physical pain is always portrayed as a dynamic process that includes the view point of the victim, the perpetr…