James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is a thrilling story of predatory emergence and the ability of a single individual to overcome destiny’s wonts and traditional effects of prophecy.
Hubris is the name assigned to the protagonist, in whom the audience finds a sort of youthful empathy. He is a pony stranded in a lost and barren land, unfamiliar to him and anything he had ever dreamed. While fully able to foresee and forearm against any territorial difficulties, cartographic or volcanic, particular anomalies have an unsurprising tendency to surprise him. This is understandably frightening, and both the dramatic irony and tension involved in the audience’s broader perspective of the dangers and the actual involvement of the mind of the poor solitary adventurer work to stir genuine emotion from the text to the heart.
Striding along, carefully and suspiciously, Hubris allows a certain amount of indignation to creep within him, a challenge to his surroundings and their terrifying environment. After a period, there is a recollection- he remembers, as it were, the painful memory of being shoed- the terribly crippling nature of the action and its implications are easy to see. However, Hubris really calls forth this mental picture as a sort of lesson- that things that at first seem unbelievably atrocious may be of equally unbelievable use in a later and proper context. This is seen even more truly when Hubris confronts the lord of the region in which he has been thrust. Catharsis is a cruel and powerful being, a dragon both in nature and in each sense of the word. He first takes Hubris by surprise, as the pony is navigating a particularly hot ravine, betwixt two frightening rivers of molten rock. Catharsis flies over, not seeing or regarding the young protagonist in any way- and this certainly must give Hubris and advantage.
And so Hubris must be what he can be and do what he believes he must do- a voice, certain in veracity and uncertain in origin reminds his mind that he should slay the dragon with self-sacrifice and fulfill his destiny. He takes this and accepts it as what he must do, and so heads off to discover the dragon’s lair. Given the aepisodic nature of the tale, he unfortunately cannot go through any number of puzzling challenges or emotional breakthroughs to unearth its location, and instead walks in the direction that Catharsis had flown from. His pace exceeds, and moves to a trot, and then a gallop, as he becomes more sure of his path and destination. The voice returns, once more more subconscious and ethereal than anything, and reassures him of his missive and mission. Ideas begin to form in the mind of anyone watching, of how the pony exactly will overcome, without much doubt to that point. It is here that an aside is particularly created, evolving on the given information and presenting the mind of Hubris from yet another perspective: the pony will make it to Catharsis’ lair, and luring him along with the idea of, well, himself as a satiation to the dragon’s esurience, he will fall, at the last possible moment, down into a firespout of a furnace, a volcano, if you will, and have Catharsis follow with him. This would in ideal allow the great beast to be defeated and the hero to at least have the necessarily just end.
However, upon reaching the unhallowed cave, its cruel lord is found to be missing. The hero reaches the inner ridge and is surprised to discover, for the first time since finding himself in this harsh and dreadful place, that he has solid footing beneath his hooves. It is then, in that moment of relatively serene discovery, that he hears the shearing cry of the dragon in whose den he is trespassing. He moves to look, and scanning the sky, spots both Catharsis, and a particularly well-placed cone of cinders and flame. The idea most certainly comes to his mind, but before he can really even break into a run, the dragon is there, and very nearly has him pinned to the stone surface. Hubris is only barely able to stand still, which causes Catharsis (who expected him to try to flee or falter) to miss, with his spiny teeth and vicious jaws snapping shut a foot from the pony’s flank. Seemingly before even thinking, but actually with conscious thought tantamount to perilous deliberation, Hubris stutter-steps and sprints away from the dragon, the scene, and anything that could have been anything. He does not try anything particularly or peculiarly heroic, neither dashing for any ledges in attempts to trick or trap the following beast nor taunting him in classic fashion. Instead, he merely focuses on keeping his feet moving, keeping his body aloft, and keeping his head out of the dragon’s jaws. In this way, Hubris escapes Catharsis, and his persistence in evasion legendarily allows him to actually succeed. He does not stop running until past when the dragon tires himself out, and Catharsis decides to track down easier game. He does not stop running until he falls, fatigued nearly to death. He realizes, as he struggles defiantly to stand, that he has worn through the very shoes he had originally despised. In this way, Hubris becomes free of his fetters and his fate. Here the story ends, with a positive assumption of the pony’s survival, and an interesting moral for us to hold heavy and keep kindly in our kindred hearts.
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