Two books, one table
Compare Set two works beside each other. Suggested pairings are arguments, not assignments.
First work Choose a work The Iliad The Odyssey Oedipus Rex Antigone Lyric Fragments The Aeneid The Georgics Metamorphoses Odes The Divine Comedy La Vita Nuova The Canterbury Tales Beowulf Hamlet King Lear Sonnets Don Quixote Essays Paradise Lost Tartuffe Gulliver’s Travels Candide Confessions The History of Rasselas Lyrical Ballads The Prelude The Great Odes Frankenstein The Tell-Tale Heart Pride and Prejudice Emma Great Expectations Bleak House Anna Karenina War and Peace Middlemarch Ulysses A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse The Trial The Metamorphosis The Waste Land Beloved One Hundred Years of Solitude Giovanni’s Room The Fire Next Time The Handmaid’s Tale Genesis The Book of Job The Psalms The Oresteia The Bacchae The Song of Roland Confessions Doctor Faustus Faust Moby-Dick Madame Bovary The Brothers Karamazov Poems Heart of Darkness The Sun Also Rises Absalom, Absalom! Blood Meridian Second work Choose a work The Iliad The Odyssey Oedipus Rex Antigone Lyric Fragments The Aeneid The Georgics Metamorphoses Odes The Divine Comedy La Vita Nuova The Canterbury Tales Beowulf Hamlet King Lear Sonnets Don Quixote Essays Paradise Lost Tartuffe Gulliver’s Travels Candide Confessions The History of Rasselas Lyrical Ballads The Prelude The Great Odes Frankenstein The Tell-Tale Heart Pride and Prejudice Emma Great Expectations Bleak House Anna Karenina War and Peace Middlemarch Ulysses A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse The Trial The Metamorphosis The Waste Land Beloved One Hundred Years of Solitude Giovanni’s Room The Fire Next Time The Handmaid’s Tale Genesis The Book of Job The Psalms The Oresteia The Bacchae The Song of Roland Confessions Doctor Faustus Faust Moby-Dick Madame Bovary The Brothers Karamazov Poems Heart of Darkness The Sun Also Rises Absalom, Absalom! Blood Meridian
Innocent suffering as a courtroom. Job’s friends and Ivan’s Inquisitor both try to close the case; the whirlwind and Alyosha’s kiss refuse the closing. Neither book lets theodicy win on points.
Novel · 1880
The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
A father is killed in a provincial town. Each son inherits a piece of the crime: intellect, appetite, faith. The Grand Inquisitor and the weeping of a child are made to share a book.
Freedom and theodicy Brother and brother Wisdom poem · c. 6th–4th c. BCE
The Book of Job The Job Poet
A blameless man is stripped of everything but speech. His friends offer theology; he offers protest. The whirlwind answers with a creation that will not be reduced to a moral.
Innocent suffering Speech and silence