In The Epic of Gilagamesh, we come across a King that has made his city of Uruk physically and architecturally appealing with amazing buildings in the city that is surrounded with large walls like The Great Wall of China but his reign has been unbearable. He treats his subjects very poorly and has no respect for them at all. As we move along in the epic we see how Gilgamesh grows fond of Enkidu whom becomes his companion on this great adventure. I will be doing a close reading of the tablets after Enkidu dies.
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I chose the picture above because I believe it is the perfect depiction of what the writer describes in Tablet IX lines 45-81. In relation to the passage, the picture would be showing the way Gilgamesh would have walked through the darkness for hours and then sees up ahead the light. The sunlight shinning through the darkness at the end and showing Gilgamesh the amazing scenery that was waiting up ahead. In that passage the writer uses a lot of repetition of the lines that say “Dense was the darkness, no light was there,it would not let him look behind him.”. The repetition of this, gave the reader the sensation of how long Gilgamesh was traveling through the darkness. The line before this one explains how much time has passed. For example it says, “when he had gone one double hour” , every fourth line after that increases by one. The writer used this repetitive phrase to emphasize the extensive time that passed during his journey. The writer’s tone throughout is suspenseful, so the reader is intrigued to know what it is that Gilagamesh is going to find when he reaches the mountains.
In the beginning of Tablet X, Gilgamesh has reached the tavern of Siduri. In lines 27-30, the reader once again sees repetition from the lines 22-25(“I am Gilgamesh, who killed the guardian, who seized and killed the bull that came down from heaven, who felled Humbaba who dwelt in the forest of cedar, who killed lions at the mountain passes.) In lines 27-30 the tavern keeper repeated to Gilgamesh what he told her but the writer wanted to convey that she was mocking him. In the lines after she is saying that although he may have done all that, his body shows great weakness. In these lines (31-36) she seems to be saying that he did all these things but yet has nothing to show for it, he did not come back looking almighty and powerful instead he looks worn down. The writer’s choice of words in these lines are critical to the point of view of the tavern keeper and to the understanding of the reader. The line that caught my attention was line 34-35 when she says, “Your face like a traveler’s from afar, your features weathered by cold and sun”. This line is the one that made me really picture how worn out Gilgamesh must have looked to those seeing him.
