Phaeton

After reading this version of Phaeton's story, I found Dryden's to be a lot more descriptive and serious rather than Zimmerman's hilarious take on it. She told it in very modern way, depicting the typical neglected teenager that wants a car. "Where have you been all my life, Dad? It's my turn. Hand it over!" (66) So the dad (Apollo) naturally feels really bad about abandoning his son, so agrees to give him the keys, but still assumes a degree of fatherly responsibility by warning him. Which is a bit hypocritical since not only he left him, but he is risking his son's life by giving him the keys, but then again, why would he care? Anyways, I think I enjoyed reading both of them, but I noticed that they were very different. Dryden's was so poetic and descriptive, you could see everything happening in your head precisely as it was told. It was a very detailed expression of how Phaeton was going to reach the sun and all the struggles he went through, and how everything exploded in the end. While in this version, Phaeton doesn't actually go on a journey for his "car
, he just talks about his problem to a therapist who tells him all these ideas he's been having are delusions. "It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths." (67) So basically, Phaeton's journey to the sun in Zimmerman's adaptation was very concrete and sarcastic. Like a bitter teenager who was forced to visit the therapist for bad behavior (making it "crash" and "chaos") towards his so-called father and doesn't really care for the therapist's opinion.