Notes on Richardo Pau-Llosa's "The Unlikely Origin of Metaphor"

May 26, 2011

Richardo Pau-Llosa,
The Unlikely Origin of Metaphor

One morning day, there was a crowd of people waiting for Jesus and listening to his explanation of the parable which people had asked. Jesus applied the whale connecting to the sinners as a metaphor. As listeners became thrilled, Jesus had disappeared without a trace, leaving a faint image for people to figure out.

For me, I would like to question at first, how many authentic metaphors does the Bible hold? Actually, it is pretty interesting for reading "The Unlikely Origin of Metaphor." At the beginning, Jesus came into a crowd of people very naturally. And later Jesus was welcomed by a crowd of people. It was a pretty peculiar phenomenon for the situation since everybody did not react to the coming of Jesus, yet it was Jesus felt surprised for everybody was waiting for him. Furthermore, in the paragraph 2, Jesus continued stating the question of whale that people had asked. Hence, we can clearly find that Jesus made pretty good explanation on the whale’s habit, and Jesus even compared other species to whale in the sea. Therefore, I am eager to be skeptical about Jesus for whether he was real in the story. Probably, he’s real identification could be a fisherman because the explanation of “this Jesus” was quite close to meet his profession.

Secondly, people in the story showed a great learning will on Jesus' words. It seemed no one would doubt about what Jesus had said. For instance, “So water is a symbol of evil here. But only here, because my disciplines and John’s are baptizing people all over the place and in those rituals water is the symbol of purity.” It somehow implied the superiority for those people who had baptized. Nonetheless, people did not question Jesus’ way of saying. And in the last, Jesus somehow disappeared in the crowd without being noticed, leaving a blur image instead. Indeed, Jesus made people shine and faint without any doubt...