SOURCE: Thornton, Peter C. “Man the Maker: Max Frisch's Homo faber and the Daedalus Myth.” Germanic Review 70, no. 4 (fall 1995): 153-63.

In the following essay, Thornton interprets Homo faber in terms of the Daedalus myth.

Juvenal, in the first of his Satires, asks why he should not attack the vices of his age instead of choosing safe subjects like “mugitum labyrinthi / et mare percussum puero fabrumque volantem” (lines 52-54). In this reference to the Cretan Labyrinth, to Icarus, and to his father, Daedalus, the last appears as a “faber volans”—the very mode in which Max Frisch's Walter Faber is discovered in the opening pages of Homo faber.¹ It is probably no more than a verbal coincidence, but the question of whether the figure of Daedalus, one of the ancient world's arch-technologists, sometimes identified with Hephaestus himself,² might have served Frisch in some way in the creation of his...