Why do you suppose everyone knows about Oedipus Rex and The Book of Job? Why do they speak to us so intimately?
I believe it must have something to do with suffering, with the place of suffering in our lives, with how the most admirable among us are able to face misery and somehow come to terms with it. Maybe this is part of our larger struggle to come to terms with the relationship between fate and free will. To what extent do our actions determine our destiny? Does God (or the gods, or whatever we call those forces stronger than the human will) intervene? for good? for ill? How can we understand a universe where a theoretically benevolent universal force permits undeserved disaster?
These questions, of course, are essentially unanswerable. Experience of our fate is the only thing that teaches us about our answer to it; and, if we’re lucky, the answer will come in some sort of incommunicable wisdom, some sort of self-knowledge or compassion akin, perhaps, to Job’s, or Oedipus’s—or, for that matter, Hamlet’s.
(Or Michael David Lukas'... here he is, a novelist, considering these same questions).
And since it is by nature incommunicable, what better essay topic to struggle with? Fair forward, adventurers: name the unnamable; struggle like Menelaus with Proteus to find the true shape and nature of your answer to this question...
What do these works show us about the role or meaning of suffering in human life?
Note: the question is NOT "What is the role or meaning of suffering in human life?" Do you see the difference? These works. The Book of Job. Oedipus Rex. The texts you are looking at. What wisdom do they point toward?
A word about process. This is not an essay you will be able to just sit down and write. Don’t try. Don’t sit in front of your computer and type an introduction.
No.
Instead, prewrite. Think. Prewrite some more. Grab a quote from one of the books that intrigues you for some reason. Freewrite. See where it leads you. Loop. Loop again. Explore other quotes. Talk about the topic with friends and neighbors and family members. Think about the works, and write about other moments that seem crucial for some reason, even if you don’t know why. Pre-write. Pre-write. Pre-write some more. What you’re looking for is the idea behind the idea behind the idea. What you’re looking for are those things the texts lead you toward, that never would have occurred to you (or anyone else) without your deep reflection. You’re looking for the risky ideas, the out-there AHA’s, the revelations, epiphanies, insights, that come of exploring your thoughts. Then write. But not from the beginning. Start from the middle, from some kernel of an idea that emerged from some pre-writing, and then start adding paragraphs in no particular order until it starts to fit together for you. Then maybe pre-write or outline something... maybe a thesis is beginning to occur to you.
Then junk everything, maybe, and start over. Soon you’ll have what I call a “draft of discovery:” in other words, a draft (the very best you can write working alone), in which you have discovered what you want to say about the topic. Maybe you haven’t honed and refined it completely, but you’ve said something significant about the literature, something beyond what you thought yourself capable of. You have deep textual support for your entirely original ideas. You are proud of the process of thought you’ve gone through.
We’ll get response for revision, revise over the following week, get editing help, edit, and hand it in. How long should it be? Until it’s finished. When we get to the next draft, I’ll tell you that I won’t read page seven. But you may have to write a lot more than that to get anything significant said. You’ll have a chance to revise it down to a manageable size. You might be able to say something significant in four pages, or in two, or in five; it’s not about the length. The big pitfall is to decide what you think before you write. Make no decisions. Explore. What do various moments in these books each separately imply? How do they begin to point you toward an interesting vision of some aspect of the question?
Have fun. Be your best brilliant selves: BIG, BOLD, and BRIEF.