Introduction: War and Death

THERE ARE MANY RESONS for us to embrace literature and to acknowledge it as an essential medium to explore and discuss the meaning of human life. From the earliest time, if we think of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, people have struggled to come to terms with the dialectics of all existence. It is difficult to handle the paradox of theodicy, the realization that the human creature has often been nothing but a horrible beast, slaughtering many people if the occasion and opportunity arise, and the observation that violence surfaces more commonly than love. The literary discourse, especially in the genre of heroic epics, has proven to be open, flexible, responsive, energetic, and expressive in regard to the fundamental need people have to cope with issues, sometimes heartrending, sometimes illuminating, sometimes exuberant, sometimes offering hope, sometimes threatening to annihilate the human race. Even if fictional texts are not chronicles, they still chronicle the dark and bright sides of human existence and serve as crucial catalysts for the analysis of problematic cases pertaining to love, hatred, the quest for God, and the inquiry about the meaning of death.

Above all, war and its terrible aftermath are common topics of ancient and medieval heroic epics, and that issue has, unfortunately, continued to torture us to the very present. Little wonder that many poets have reflected on those horrors and tried to make at least some sense out of them, or, to put it differently, to lend words to those terrible experiences that seem to be ineffable. How can people do this to other people? Both the Holocaust and the atomic bomb have demonstrated that there is virtually nothing to hold back governments, armies, private organizations, and other groups from developing ever more devastating weapons, allegedly with the purpose of defending themselves. The arms race is an ever-ongoing process that began thousands of years ago, although the modern weapons industry has now reached an unforeseen level at which those weapons can annihilate all of humankind. To argue politically, we could even go so far as to claim that the modern world has reached an unprecedented readiness to commit mass violence that makes the conditions in the Middle Ages look rather different.