Vision and Desire: Jim Morrison's Mythography Beyond the Death of God

The poetry of Jim Morrison, as opposed to his lyric verse, has been the subject of little critical examination. The aim of this paper is to open up an understanding and interpretation of a mythographic landscape developed by Morrison in his response to existence in a demythologised western culture. Through the use of the Greek myth of Oedipus in its entirety, as opposed to the two most universally known events of the adult Oedipus' life, discussion here will attempt to demonstrate that Morrison developed a cohesive, holistic vision of the human condition of existence in the world, and presented a path of possibility for transcending its conflict. Indeed, it is proposed here that Morrison draws a clear path to and framework for living beyond the death of God. For structure, discussion will be framed around not only the Oedipal myth, but also the 'Three Metamorphoses' found in Nietzsche's <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>, a transformational trinity which is easily aligned to the story of Oedipus. Critical theory will be drawn from mythology, principally through the work of Joseph Campbell, existentialism, from the work of Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre, psychoanalysis, drawing mainly from Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan and philosophy, based largely though not exclusively, in Friedrich Nietzsche' s <i>The Will to Power</i>.