How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

This chapter deals with physical marks in literature, which often take the form of some kind of deformity. Foster explains that, in the past, it was thought that God’s favor took physical manifestations: those with beauty and strength were seen to be favored while people with deformities were assumed not to have God’s favor. Although beliefs have changed since then, characters still often have marks of some kind as a way to set them apart. Foster describes Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, in which many characters have physical deformities. On one hand, he writes, this tendency represents a kind of overall exoticism, but it also suggests that everyone in life is flawed in some way. While characters may have marks that have no significance, that is a rare occurrence since it is easier to write about those with no marks or limitations. 

Here the author examines blindness in literature, which suggests a focus on “other levels of sight and blindness beyond the physical” (210). Oedipus Rex is a classic work from ancient Greece that deals extensively with this issue of who “sees” (knows) and who doesn’t. One character, Tiresias, is a blind prophet who sees the truth in what will follow the birth of Oedipus.