Whats the most powerful image of literature?

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

this

Sssshhh. Can you hear the river? it doesn't give a shit about your problems

Lol

Thank you based Martin

woah woah woah I don't remember that being a plot point whatsoever

They're interchangeable anyway.

>Oedipus first words after he removes his eyes
Refresh my memory, s'il vous plaît.
>stychomathia between Agamemnon and Clymnestea
Recommend translation, bitte.

All is well, if I recall correctly

Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother

Gould cutting a tree in Bernhard's The Loser
The death of grannie in ISOLT
The death of Don Quixote

Christ in the cross. atleast in the western literature. before Christianity it was obviously the sun rising.

Lightning crashing as Wyatt confronts his father's maniacal religion.

Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of cold fried chicken between them, and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her, and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.

They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale — and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

As I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along the dark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting where I had left him in the drive.

“Is it all quiet up there?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes, it’s all quiet.” I hesitated. “You’d better come home and get some sleep.”

He shook his head.

“I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.”

He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight — watching over nothing.

>Gatsbyposting
You'll grow out of it eventually user

last part of animal farm

>Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

At that point, impatient to know his own origin, Aureliano skipped ahead. Then the wind began, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, the murmurs of ancient geraniums, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia. He did not notice it because at that moment he was discovering the first indications of his own being in a lascivious grandfather who let himself be frivolously dragged along across a hallucinated plateau in search of a beautiful woman who would not make him happy. Aureliano recognized him, he pursued the hidden paths of his descent, and he found the instant of his own conception among the scorpions and the yellow butterflies in a sunset bathroom where a mechanic satisfied his lust on a woman who was giving herself out of rebellion. He was so absorbed that he did not feel the second surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations. Only then did he discover that Amaranta Ursula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha only so that they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths of blood until they would engender the mythological animal that was to bring the line to an end. Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

Pontius Pilate in purgatory, some sort of island outside of space and time, and the mom who aborted her baby being given the handkerchief that had been used to kill the baby

Both in The Master and Margarita

one of em would be deffo zeus unleashing himself in front of semele

jesus on cross is not a powerful image, it's a placeholder for something bigger.
come at me

Isn't this something everyone understands?

no, since it was posted itt

>Christ in the cross.
This. The answer is rather obvious.

>and it is sweet to shipwreck in such a sea

MacBeth trying to wash away the blood of Duncan from his hands.

Brutus leads the senators in the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Mr. Rochester mad wife, locked in the attic.

A Frenchman eating a cake, remembering a different cake.

Atticus Finch at trial, defending a black man for a crime he didn’t commit.

speaking of the iliad, I really adore logue's rendering of patroclus fighting and dying at the walls of troy, even those dumb mindfucky typography flairs that were so popular at the time

Also you could make a whole list of ones just from the bible.

Eve being coaxed by the Snake.

Noah on his Arc, with a pair of every animal.

The Tower of Babel.

God destroying Sodom and Gomorrah for the gay stuff.

Abraham with his blade raised, ready to sacrifice Isaac.

The 10 plagues of Egypt and Moses rescuing the Jews from slavery by parting the Red Sea.

Moses receiving the 10 commandments, but upon seeing his people worshiping the Golden Calf, smashing the plates.

The walls of Jericho collapsing.

David beating mighty Goliath with only his sling and his wits.

Job versus God.

The birth of Jesus

Jesus feeding 5000 with bread and fish.

Jesus walking on water.

Jesus telling stories on the mount.

The last supper.

Jesus on the cross.

Also later;
Dante standing at the gates of Hell.

Lusifer and the rebellious angels being cast from heaven.

Others from Greek mythology;

Icarus’s wax wings melting as he flies too close to the sun.

Prometheus being punished eternally for bringing fire to man.

Pandora opening her jar.

Hercules battling the Hydra

King Midas holding is daughter whom he just turned into solid gold.

Narcissus looking at his own reflection in the water.

when Pali impregnates all of his cousin's pores by smearing his semen on her, causing her to give intinite births.

What in the hell are you talking about my dude
The first chapter in IJ is the latest point chronologically and he is very much alive the entire time

...

Jesus Christ on the cross. There's nothing so horrifying yet so beautiful at the same time.

Buddha under the tree

The burning sand and the runners in Canto 14 of the Inferno

The suicides having their limbs ripped off (I forget which Canto).

Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.

The souls of the proud in Purgatorio

Lear getting his eyes ground out

Christian in the House of the Interpreter

that's lovely, user- and makes Thoreau magically vital to me in 2018. Reading Muir now, perhaps I'll read Maine Woods next. It's been on my shelf for years.

Noah being drunkenly ass-banged by his own grandson, wtf was that all about YHWH

The murder of Cinna the Poet

Ishmael and Quequeg doing pillowtalk

Miltons Satan being cast from Heaven

Elizabeth Bennets bonet billowing before Darcys baleful brown eyes

Medea's infanticide.

vermin*

hm. brings to mind Lot being incestuously raped by his unquestionably hot daughters on consecutive nights.

>Odysseus saying his name is "Nobody"
>murder scene in C and P
>Macbeth's play and Macbeth's speech after entering insanity
>the frozen river in the Inferno
>Opening lines in Faust from the angels
>IJ describing the outcomes of the tapes
>DFW's short story's ending with the child genius in the jungle (in oblivion, forget the name)
>Don Quixote's apology, heart wrenching
>opening lines of Ovid's metamorphosis
>the anecdote in Der Prozess
>Gulliver arriving at the island of mathematicians
>Joyce looking at the sails

The entire Altazor's Canto II

An amalgamous Death raping his mother Sin in Paradise Lost

Quixote's visions while dangling from a rope in the caves of Montesinos.

Voldemort's resurrection in Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.

Feels

>shooting a dude, then freaking the fuck out and shooting him a bunch more because you don't know what to do and you just don't care anymore

>""""innocent"""

>Alexei Fyodorvitch surrounded by cheering children
Congratulations karamazov

Pelletier killing himself in a bathtub

None of those are powerful.
Westerners don't know how to write.

good call on Molly Bloom chapter

Don Quixote charging into a windmill

*giant
don't believe ondore' lies!

Why did Vaan think it would be a good idea to play a captain in his 40s? He's a scrawny teenager.

>>K. waking up as a bug
>Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he turned into a bug.

Cool I just started The Trail. Guess I won't need to finish it.

Sort of surprised nobody has yet mentioned the final scene of Grapes of Wrath

man, i really want to read this book...

...

Holy...I want more

you have 10 seconds to recall a quran meme

>odysseus doing nofap with sirens
lel so late-2010's

Good thread

I'll add:
>Theseus following figthing the minotaur and following the golden thread
>Sysyphus rolling up the boulder for all eternity
>Tantalus condemned to swim in a lake with fruit hangin overhead, but being unable to drink or eat.
>The titan Atlas holding the world upon his shoulders

That magic carpet ride by night to Jerusalem

how did the labyrinth become more famous than the creation of minotaur itself?

any jungian archetypes appeared yet?
cant be that important if they are too low energy.

Don Quixote charging the windmill.

If i'm not limited to those, I'd say David dancing covered in ashes.

If I am: Achilles dragging hector.

Waking up as a bug isn't that special.

Isaac Newton opening the gate of knowledge

...

This conversation is literally about mimesis, the REPRESENTATION of an aspect of the human experience in art of literature. Images are "placeholders" by definition.

Best answer.

>cake
What's this from?

>people in this thread are adding IJ
Fucking embarrassing. The great meme book has been out only two decades and it'll likely be forgotten by the end of the century.

I believe it's ISOLT. I've never read it but one of the most famous passages is him eating a madeleine and it suddenly bringing back vivid memories of a previous madeleine in a different situation.

Jesus on the cross

Or Satan being forced to kneel before Michael's(?) sword.

this is hot
did the sacred bull rape her?

Personally I was joking, but I can't speak for others

Rape? Pasiphae seduced the bull. That's why Daedalus made the heifer costume, user.

Ser Arthur Evans.

This

She wanted it after Poseidon had a spell placed on her. So magical roofi?

The labyrinth may have been significant outside of the Minotaur mythos. Christianity picked it up as a symbol for finding God or the path to heaven.

the most powerful images can survive without context.
you need an army of priests to convince us that it was a special event.