[mandazzle]

Do you think that in Everyman, the whole part about being able to save yourself before being damned to hell is an accurate portrait of what really happens?
Just wondering.

[altonwoodsdrphil]

no

[SeptemberMorn]

Not hardly.

[(JD)]

I haven't read the whole book; don't have time for fiction these days. Plus, any writer that is touted by both the New York Times and The Washington Post doesn't usually get a second glance by me.

I think that many ppl really don't think about death and hell and salvation until they have a near death experience; that includes growing old, to me.

If one is stuck in quick sand, how would she save herself?

The idea of self salvation is contrary to what I believe. I believe The Holy Bible and what it says about salvation. God's love seems a much better way to go. I'm glad I chose that way, anyway.

[EJ711]

A long time ago.

[mandazzle]

Ok well in a nut shell:

Death is God's messenger. God is disappointed because people are living sinful lives and so he decides to teach mankind to live better lives. When summoned by Death, the character Everyman hopes that his friends will go with him on the journey. First he goes to the Fellowship, his friends, and they tell him they would do anything for him, they would murder someone for him, but when they are faced with accompanying him they refuse. He then goes to Kinsman and Cousin, his family, who say the same thing and abandon him just as Fellowship did. On the judgment day, a person must bring their Account Book, which is every good deed and every bad deed of the person's life, and that will dictate whether they go to Heaven or Hell. Everyman goes to Goods which represents all his material value to ask to accompany him, but Goods tells him that he would be worse off with it because it would show God how materialistic he is. He then goes to Good Deeds, which is very weak and cannot even stand because of the lack of good deeds he has done in his life. It tells him it cannot go with him, but refers him to Knowledge, who takes him to Confession. In order to win salvation, Everyman must confess and do penance. He also gets Discretion, Strength, Beauty, and Five Wits(senses) to follow him. They follow him up until the edge of his grave, when only Good Deeds follows him into his grave. In the epilogue it says that his soul ascends to Heaven.

Personally, I really enjoyed it. It was also a loop hole sorta thing to talk about religion in school without getting in trouble for it.

[Perna]

Everyman, a short play of some 900 lines, portrays a complacent Everyman who is informed by Death of his approaching end. The play shows the hero's progression from despair and fear of death to a "Christian resignation that is the prelude to redemption."1 First, Everyman is deserted by his false friends: his casual companions, his kin, and his wealth. He falls back on his Good Deeds, his Strength, his Beauty, his Intelligence, and his Knowledge. These assist him in making his Book of Accounts, but at the end, when he must go to the grave, all desert him save his Good Deeds alone. The play makes its grim point that we can take with us from this world nothing that we have received, only what we have given.

The play was written near the end of the fifteenth century. It is probably a translation from a Flemish play, Elckerlijk (or Elckerlyc) first printed in 1495, although there is a possibility that Everyman is the original, the Flemish play the translation. There are four surviving versions of Everyman, two of them fragmentary.

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/everyman.htm

[BalishBun]

unfort i have not.