Essays on literary works - 2024

Myth and Reality in John Updike's “The Centaur”

Let’s get something out of the way real fast: reading John Updike’s The Centaur feels like trying to untangle Christmas lights in a thunderstorm while your ex is texting you vague threats. It's dazzling. It's annoying. It's mythological metafiction laced with small-town Pennsylvania trauma. And somehow, it slaps.

There’s this thing Updike does—where you think you’re reading about a middle-aged science teacher with eczema (George Caldwell), and suddenly—bam!—you’re in Ovid’s backyard, feeding pomegranates to centaurs while contemplating cosmic decay. It’s like Updike took a Greyhound bus from New England straight into the subconscious and brought a translator’s lexicon with him. The Centaur isn’t just a novel. It’s a hallucination in MLA format.

So. Myth and reality. That’s our jam. But this isn’t your 10th grade mythology unit with clean parallels and pastel diagrams of Mount Olympus. Updike doesn’t serve mythology straight—he dilutes it into the grime of American realism. The ancient and the mundane drip into each other like an oil spill on a rain puddle. Sometimes it shimmers. Sometimes it’s just a mess.

George Caldwell = Chiron. The wounded centaur. You probably knew that from SparkNotes. But Updike doesn’t just overlay myth onto modernity like a transparent sticker. He melts the two together like a vinyl record left in the sun. So you get scenes where George is trudging through snow, half-father half-beast, misunderstood and dying slowly of bad posture and deferred dreams. And then—boom—a shift, and we’re in Olympus again. Except Olympus looks like a 1940s classroom where nobody respects teachers and everyone smells faintly of wet wool and existential dread.

Peter (George’s son) = Prometheus, maybe. Or Jesus. Or just a kid with too much internal monologue. It’s hazy. That’s the point.

Literature as glitchcore: where Updike flexes

There’s something aggressively unclean about how The Centaur blends form and content. Narrative-wise, it’s disorienting AF. You go from suburban ennui to ancient lamentations without warning. Like, there’s zero respect for plot comfort. (Updike is basically saying: “Oh, were you hoping for coherent storytelling? Lol.”)

But this is what myth is for. It’s not about continuity. It’s about pattern recognition across timelines. Mythology is just the original meme culture—compressed stories with shared cultural resonance. Updike weaponizes that. He plugs George Caldwell’s bleak, anti-heroic dad-energy into the mythos mainframe and says, "Here, feel something eternal about this guy no one appreciates."

That’s the brilliance. You don’t like George. He’s sweaty. He’s cranky. He’s got ’dad who peaked in ’36’ energy. But he bleeds myth. He is myth. Not because he’s noble, but because he’s wounded, forgotten, tragically trying.

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The kicker? Updike isn’t mythologizing George to make him grand. He’s doing the opposite. He’s showing that even the ancient archetypes are just tired guys teaching biology to kids who don’t care. The myth is exhausted. And that’s devastating. And gorgeous.

Also: let’s not ignore how The Centaur is basically one long anxiety dream about masculinity, legacy, and mortality. George is all self-sacrifice and failure. Peter is all nervous ambition and survivor’s guilt. Together, they’re this ouroboros of generational miscommunication. It’s like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but replace the cannibals with passive aggression and unspoken resentment.

Let’s get uncomfortably real: Updike saw the end of the American male fantasy coming, and he laced it with Latin.

Hot take time: Updike as literary softcore philosopher

I mean—who else would make a book that reads like a mythological fever dream narrated by an NPR dad on Ambien? The Centaur is a lowkey apocalypse disguised as a Bildungsroman. Peter’s coming-of-age isn’t a triumph. It’s a slow, aching retreat from magic. From myth. From his father’s archetype. It’s growing up and realizing the centaur was just a guy with a limp and a busted car and no savings. And loving him anyway.

And that’s where Updike breaks you. Right there. Because myth is comforting until it isn’t. Until you realize you’re not special. You’re just echoing patterns. And maybe that’s what it means to be human: to loop myth until it stops feeling divine and starts feeling painfully, heartbreakingly normal.

No clean takeaway. No moral. Just vibes.

(Insert TikTok audio: “I’m just a baby!” — Peter, basically, every chapter)

Wrapping without wrapping

There’s no tidy ending here because Updike doesn’t believe in closure. Myth doesn’t resolve. It echoes. George dies without glory. Peter grows up with trauma as inheritance. The gods are dead. The teacher gets tenure posthumously. And the kid never stops translating his dad’s pain into metaphor because that’s what art is.

So yeah—The Centaur is hard to read. It’s infuriating. It’s brilliant. It’s a Greek tragedy wearing flannel. Myth and reality aren’t fighting in this book. They’re slow-dancing in a collapsing school gym.

And honestly? That’s the most accurate metaphor for growing up I’ve ever seen.