SOURCE: “The Sick Hero Reborn: Two Versions of the Philoctetes Myth,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3, September, 1980, pp. 334-40.

In the following essay, Dean compares the tragic vision that both degrades and ennobles humanity in The Man in the Maze with that of Sophocle's Philoctetes.

A striking Graeco-Roman sard intaglio of the Greek hero Philoctetes which is now in the Francis Bartlett Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston shows the wounded warrior naked, recumbent and in agony within his cave on the island of Lemnos. This remarkable engraving in precious stone portrays Philoctetes clutching the bow of Herakles with such intensity with his left hand that his veins and arteries are bulging out in painful detail all the way up to his shoulder blades. Lower down in the engraving we see his right leg, slightly elevated and swollen to twice its normal size—especially...