The Centaur
Over three snowbound days in January 1947 a failing science teacher in small-town Pennsylvania is convinced he is dying of cancer, worries about money and about his son, and faces down a class that will not sit still. The narration keeps slipping into the myth of Chiron, the centaur pierced by an arrow whose wound he cannot heal. Updike's most openly experimental book, and the one he said came closest to his own boyhood.
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Lineage
- alludes to ↑ Prometheus Bound
Attributes
Plot structure
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 59% · 11 shared
- 57% · 11 shared
- 55% · 10 shared
- 54% · 11 shared
- 52% · 10 shared
- 52% · 9 shared