Gilgamesh by Stephen Mitchell Page A

the treasure or slays the dragon or wins the princess or joins with the mind of the sage, the hero can return to ordinary life in a state of grace, as a blessing to himself and to his whole community. He has suffered, he has triumphed, he is at peace.
    The more we try to fit
Gilgamesh
into the pattern of this archetypal journey, the more bizarre, quirky, and postmodern it seems. It is the original quest story. But it is also an anti-quest, since it undermines the quest myth from the beginning. Gilgamesh does slay the monster, but that, it turns out, is a violation of the divine order of things and causes the death of his beloved friend. He does journey to the edge of the world, he meets the wise man, but still there is no transformation. Utnapishtim asks him the same questions Shiduri asked, and Gilgamesh answers with the same anguished cries, whereupon Utnapishtim offers him yet another piece of conventional wisdom—beautiful words, but as useless to him as Shiduri’s were. What’s the good of saying, like everybody’s obtuse uncle, that Gilgamesh should realize how fortunate he is, that life is short and death is final? It is like all well-meaning advice that tells us to accept things as they are. We
can’t
accept things as they are, so long as we think that things should be different. Tell us how not to believe what we think, and then maybe we’ll be able to hear.
    In any case, for Utnapishtim to say that life is short is a bit disingenuous. Life
isn’t
short-for him. That’s the point! Why else hasGilgamesh traveled to the edge of the world to see him? The desperate, grief-stricken man standing before Utnapishtim feels less fortunate than the very fool he is purportedly so superior to. He wants to transcend death, not accept it—right now, not in some happy future.
    There is no consolation in platitudes, and for Utnapishtim to tell him that he is going to die seems as tactless as it was for St. Paul to tell the Thessalonians that they were
not
going to die.
    The only effect the speech seems to have is that Gilgamesh finally recognizes the old man as Utnapishtim. He also acts with a restraint that we haven’t seen before. “I intended to fight you,” he says,
    â€œyet now that I stand before you, now that I see who you are, I can’t fight, something is holding me back.”
    Finally, Gilgamesh gets to ask his burning question: How did Utnapishtim overcome death and become immortal? Utnapishtim, who is not a believer in making a long story short, tells him about the Great Flood. His speech is a very strong piece of writing, as beautiful as its descendent, the Noah story, but far more detailed and dramatic, and filled with the most vivid images: the unsuspecting workmen drinking barrels of beer and wine to celebrate the completion of the ship; the terrified gods fleeing to the highest heaven and cowering there like dogs; Utnapishtim falling to his knees and weeping at the first touch of the blessed sunlight; the gods, starved because all theirhuman food-providers have drowned, smelling the sweet fragrance of Utnapishtim’s sacrifice and clustering around it like flies.
    The Flood story explains Utnapishtim’s exemption from mortality by narrating the circumstances that prompted the gods’ decision. It also explains the Prologue’s statement that Gilgamesh “had been granted a vision / into the great mystery, the secret places, / the primeval days before the Flood.” The vision into the great mystery does not, however, seem to do Gilgamesh a bit of good, at least now. It certainly doesn’t tell him how to overcome death. Immortality, it turns out, was a one-time offer, and that bleak fact is Utnapishtim’s main revelation.
    Why, then, did the poet include the Flood story at such length? Is it merely an interesting digression? Any reader who wants to understand its dramatic function in the poem should read Book XI again, this time skipping