"The House of Astarion" and Popular Perception of the Minotaur

This paper was a semester long project meant to reflect all that we had learnt over the course of the semester in Classical Mythology, taught by Professor Dan Curley. We were to choose a specific contemporary example of a modern interpretation of a character from classical mythology and compare that chosen example with the original myth.  I chose the short story “The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges, which reinterprets the myth of the Minotaur and Theseus, casting the Minotaur as a sympathetic figure.

If I could redo this item, I would want to expand it into a larger project about the Minotaur centered around modern reinterpretations of the Minotaur. I believe my project was successful as an analysis of the Minotaur as a character across texts, however I think it could have been improved if I made my analysis more explicit throughout the text. My conclusion utilizes an example introduced the paragraph before it which I compare with Borges’ Minotaur in order to make my final point of the Minotaur being representative of societally othered groups. I think this conclusion would have been more successful had I included more of the examples I used throughout the text and had better integrated my analysis of Roberta Gellis’ Bull God into the rest of the paper.