A Great Fall….Icarus

One of the most prominent highlights in this class would be the texts that we study. They consist of various genres and deals with a spectrum of issues. Such was (and still is) the stories in Metamorphosis by Ovid. We had the opportunity to not only read two of his stories but also sort of performed them. It was quite amazing how much of creativity could be tapped from the entire class of TESL 7 (thanks to Puan Juridah).

Icarus, when I heard this name I could remember few famous companies have been named after him. However, I don’t understand why people look up for a person who had a great fall. At first, I also don’t understand what all this about but when I look and study the painting of Icarus, then only I get the point. If we have a first glance at the painting, we are unable to notice Icarus’s leg at the one end of painting. I found out that even though he had fell into the sea but the people around the place go through the life as if nothing is happening and nobody cares about the scenario at the sea. As for me, Icarus paid for his action, he disobeys his father’s advice where the desire of flying high took over reminder from his father. The moral value that we can derive from the tale is always obeying the advices given by elders and we must go on with our life no matter what happens. This is because time will not wait for us, we have to fulfil every seconds that we have by doing something useful for us.


We were assigned to perform "Daedalus and Icarus" where we were supposed to re-act it according to our understanding of the storyline. At first, most of my group members were not as enthusiast as they were supposed to be when it comes to acting. Most of them had difficulties in understanding the text due to its linguistic difficulties. After some brief discussions, we were able to write down the script. This retelling of story has a unique highlight since it applies the narratorial technique in revealing the gist of the story. The narrator is a neutral figure as we purposely did not include her as a character in the story. This is done in order to give more perspective to the story. And this attempt was indeed successful when Miss Dzeelfa praised our presentation and she personally liked our narratorial technique. One of the groups that personally attracted me would be Iskandar’s group because they took the story; "Pyramus and Thisbe" into a different dimension by acting as gay couples. The whole class had good laugh with their acting.