Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The ‘scrapheap’ Job -- #328

[July 2006 journal entry]
I see the ‘scrapheap’ Job as troubled (beyond the sheer pain of his condition) because his expectations were so deeply rooted in the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm that is critiqued in the story/play. The ‘scrapheap’ Job cannot say, “I’ve been dealt a bad hand” and refer to the luck, the randomness, the misfortune of a ‘chance factor’ at work in human experience. Instead, he expects to be dealt a good hand and cannot (with integrity) avoid challenging/questioning the dealer (i.e., ‘God’). (Note a limit to the use of the dealer analogy in that there is a personal factor -- the dealer -- and there is a random factor -- the shuffle of the cards -- in the reference.)