This article looks at Coleridge"s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" from the perspective of Levinas"s notion of being and existence. The journey of the Ancient Mariner follows the structure of leaving, experiencing, and returning, and then wandering. But the experiences during the voyage, in spite of their mysteries and wonders, bring only a sense of weariness and entrapment. In this article the weariness and entrapment are discussed in terms of Levinas"s account of being and the existent. The mariner"s departure, the entrapment in the silent sea, and the return to his own country constitute both an attempt to escape from some form of imprisonment and the inevitable failure of that attempt, and this may be understood as a representation of Levinas"s notion that it is our own existence that is trapped in being.<BR> The Mariner"s wanderings after all the hardships that he has undergone are a symptom of his Narcissism which can set itself only one project, to win the other over to its own consciousness. Through this the subject establishes the object as a necessary gauge of itself. When mind establishes the self as the subject and the object as its own negative other, the mind is successfully granted a status of universality. In this case, the other is to be assimilated into myself, rather than the other in the face of which I might abandon myself. When the I does not know the other as itself, the I feels as if it is confined within itself, which is necessarily an experience of solitude. In all his wanderings the Mariner does not succeed in escaping from himself but merely accomplishes an aggrandizement of his self or a projection onto the whole world of his sense of his own universality.
(0)
(0)