A New Take on Ancient Tragedy Fatality in Emmanuel Carrere's Book, The Adversary

The Adversary written by Emmanuel Carrere, a well-known French writer and winner of the prestige Renaudot French literary award in 2011, is a title he chose himself for his book that was published in 2000. The title was very expressive and it entailed the menacing demonic presence that existed within the main character of the book. Jean-Claude Romand is a real person who murdered his father, mother, wife and 2 young children and was sentenced to life at first in 1993 in France which was later mercifully reduced to 15 years of imprisonment. In Carrere’s opinion, who is newspaper reporter and a religious writer, the inhumane act of Jean-Claude Romand was a sign of the existence of devilish temptations in weak hearted and frail human souls. So he recounted the event in his own perspective. In this half fiction and half biographical piece of work, the writer tries to portray Jean-ClaudeRomand as a tragic ancient Greek or Roman hero that despite his best efforts does not succeedin overcoming his tragic fate known as “Ananke” in ancient Greek or “Fatum” in Latin. He managed to showJean-Claude Romand’s mental illness of “lying and exaggerating” or “mythomania” as an ancient tragedy fatality in this book. As in most ancient tragedies of Greece or ancient Rome, this destructive and inevitable power causes Jean-Claude’s misfortune and destroys his family. With this Carrere awakened the ancient tragic heroes once again and this time gave a new and modern face to them to the reader. An anti-hero who’s fate is as dark and sad as his ancient counterparts even though he is not majestic as them. In this book the writer shows that despite their advanced appearance, if the modern man does not have control over their own inner weaknesses they will easily become the devil’s playthings as their ancestors before them thousands of years ago were and only misfortune and misery will await them and their peers. This is also while the devil like modern human does not even have a smidgen of the grandeur and braveness of the ancient heroes and cannot answer to the enigma of his wrong ways.