/lit/ - Literature

>>16710214
I never even thought about the parallels between the Confucian relationships and their representation in the book, so thankyou for bringing that up! Another aspect worth mentioning is in the very beginning in the book, Sensei is with a westerner at the beach when the narrator first sees him, and I wonder if the westerner symbolizes Sensei's (earlier with K) embracing of self-interest over honor (With the West being self-interest and the East, honor, (sorry if this is an elementary conception because I don't know much about the new western ideas on the social dynamic in Japan)), and when he goes to the beach without the westerner giving the narrator the time to meet Sensei it represents Sensei's return to Japanese ideals leading to his seppuku?

K, to me, is a role model, and it is his death that completes the book for me, because I have read Kierkegaard and I can only think of his ideas of an absolute devotion towards God through the leap of faith to escape the confusion and misery of the aesthetic-ethical mode of living, and Kierkegaard's own life where he broke off the engagement with the love of his life in order to devote himself to God, leading to his misery within leaving the love of his life, but doubly his faith in God being more infinite and absolute than any other relation. K, to me, represents someone like this who struggles in abandoning the temporal absolutely, he refuses his brazier, and even food, and he tried to refuse moving in, but over time Ojosan got to him. I wonder if it is because his ideals truly were challenged by his gripping fall for Ojosan, that he resolved to kill himself, and to ease the immense stress that was this path he wanted to devote his life toward. Or could it be that K was jealous that Sensei got her first? I am less inclined towards the latter.

Was K made miserable by his own draconian ascetic practices? I think back to the cliff on the sea scene, where Sensei grips K by the neck and feigns to push him off, and K acts apathetic towards dying at all, about being pushed towards his death in the sea. If K is trying to resign from the temporal so much, I really wonder if he has lost any value for the temporal world at all, and living to him is just a continuation of the will he wants to reject, and it is in the afterlife where his reward waits. But shouldn't ascetic men be happy through their immense virtue and practice of denying the will? I wonder if K is just too young and emulates the men of old out of necessity and does not follow the path for itself, but rather out of custom of what his father did, but to a degree greater (for he joins a sect that requires celibacy)