To Icarus, his life after the fall is completely incompatible with his life before it. It molds Icarus’s character he asks himself, “What was he doing aging in the suburb?/ Can the genius of the hero fall/ To the middling stature of the merely talented?” (19-21). This contrast between the vibrant, lively, and sometimes dangerous life of the past with the uncaring, unexciting, and predictable life of the present is central to Field’s adaptation. He is doomed to be a hero within the body of an ordinary man, trapped within a society which no longer recognizes him, and-even worse-no longer cares who he is or what he has achieved.
Thus, Icarus is unable to reveal his true identity. In a society where the individual is more concerned with maintaining the status quo, such as tending to their “neat front yards” (17), the concept of the hero would seem completely foreign and un-relatable. How is living a normal life, in which no one knows who you are, heroic? The very concept of the hero is an archaic one-it belongs completely in the legends and mythologies of the past rather than in the news and histories of the present. After the fall, Icarus begins to question whether he really is the hero. However, he never expects to survive his fall. It is bitter in that he lets his ambitions get the better of him, yet it is also sweet in that he becomes the hero he was striving to be, if only temporarily. In the traditional myth, his fall is a bittersweet one. Icarus is a symbol of youthful rebellion what, then, is he doing living a monotonous, mundane adult life under the pseudonym of “Mr. In his adaptation, the archetypal Icarus-the exuberant and daring youth known so well-is replaced with a morose, defeated, and reserved adult after his fall. Field uses this fall as a turning point in the story. His fall is a direct result of his recklessness and his youthful overestimation of his abilities, as he attempts to become a great hero by flying higher than anybody before him (Graf). Icarus, however, is so overcome with the feeling of flight that he ignores his father and flies high into the air, where the wax melts and he plummets into the sea. Daedalus warns his son not to fly too close to the sun, or else the wax will melt. Traditionally, Icarus and Daedalus escape from prison using artificial wings made from wax and feathers. The defining moment in both the original myth of Icarus and in Field’s adaptation is Icarus’s fall. It was not so strange, then, that Field had succeeded in adapting the myth of Icarus to fit present day society. More specifically, the character of Icarus and the symbolism of his fall is inherently tied with human nature. Of course Icarus did not survive the fall, and even if he had, why would he have ended up in modern times? How is the classical period of the ancient Greeks even somewhat compatible with present day? However, as I thought more about it, I began to realize that many of the motifs expressed in the original myth continued to be expressed in Field’s adaptation, yet with a twist that fits the character of the modern age.
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