Symbolism and Ambiguity in Ovid's The Myth of Icarus When reading Ovid's The Myth of Icarus one might ask “what is the moral of this story?” or “what does it all mean?”. I believe that that is exactly what Ovid wanted the reader to think, he wanted you to ask the big questions not to make life difficult as some might believe but in fact to make you think so that what you take from the story is unique to you and you alone. In Ovid’s poem Daedalus and Icarus we see many forms of ambiguity including Icarus’s death. Was Icarus’s death his father's fault? there are many different ways to look at this question. First and foremost there is the fact that Daedalus warned his son which we can see when Daedalus tells his son:
My son, I caution…show more content… ” (Ovid 365). By “cursing his art” (Ovid 365) Daedalus is taking credit for his actions and is showing us the guilt that resides in the man. The definition of guilt is “a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has compromised his or her own standards of conduct or has violated a moral standard and bears significant responsibility for that violation.” (Strickland) This demonstrates the prior stated argument that it is in fact Daedalus’s fault his son is…show more content… They flank the Icarus myth in book VIII and have gods and magic unequivocally present. This alternating sequence is typical of what has been called the «dialogue» or «polyphony» of the Metamorphoses. The absence of divine interaction in human life is likely to be Ovid's way of giving the Daedalus story a certain philosophical atmosphere, derived from a poet Ovid greatly admired : Lucretius. Commentators agree in their observation that Ovid had no «philosophical mind», but applied philosophical theories where appropriate for his subject. So, far from being a fervent partisan of a philosophical doctrine as Lucretius was, Ovid liked to play with the theories and see how they looked in a certain setting. (Hoefmans