Gilgamesh 3

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by the fixed idea that there are just five true colors. There is an infinite continuity of shading, and breaking it down into divisions with names distracts the attention from its subtlety" . Similarly, the mind's sensitivity to the meaning of life is
impaired by fixed notions or perspectives on what it means to be human. There is an infinite continuity of meaning that can be comprehended only by seeing again, for ourselves. We read stories -- and reading is a kind of re-telling -- not to learn what is known but to know what cannot be known, for it is ongoing and we are in the
middle of it.
To see for ourselves the meaning of a story, we need, first of all, to look carefully at what happens in the story; that is, we need to look at it as if the actions and people it describes actually took place or existed. We can articulate the questions raised by a character's actions and discuss the implications of their consequences. But we
need to consider, too, how a story is put together ...

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writing, the narrator attempts to convince us that Gilgamesh was an actual king and that the story that follows is a true story. On the other hand, by calling our attention to the act of telling, the narrator reminds us that the truth of a story might lie in
the very fact of its being a story -- the undeniable fact of its narration. To deny its narration would be to deny our own existence. Either way, the frame blurs the distinction between Gilgamesh's world, or the world of the tale, and our own.

And yet there is an irony in the prologue of which the narrator himself seems unaware -- an irony that highlights our position as readers and not listeners. Praising Gilgamesh's ...

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