Re-reading World History through an “all-seeing eye”: Cultural relativism in Gore Vidal’s Creation

Year 2012, Issue: 35, 79 - 96, 01.06.2012

Vassilaki Papanicolaou

Abstract

Well-born, well-connected, well-endowed and indisputably talented, Vidal has adopted a role at once humble and over-arching. On the one hand, the careful recorder of events, the re-inventor of history, the recorder on the other, the all-knowing, all-seeing eye — not unlike his hero Cyrus Spitama in this book who becomes the “Eye” of Darius the Great, King of Kings” Bragg 842 .

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