Vultures

In Romain Gary’s account, Vultures begin as instruments of divine punishment in the Prometheus myth and become emblems of defiance when its hidden ending is restored. Their changing role binds the story’s imaginative reversal to the narrator’s sense of art as a way to resist helplessness and remain alive.

Role in the Prometheus Story

The familiar account has Prometheus steal fire from the gods, be chained to a rock, and suffer as a vulture attacks his liver. Romain Gary presents this as an incomplete telling: when the gods later look down, they find that Prometheus has freed himself and seized the vulture. Instead of remaining only the victim of punishment, he turns the encounter around, consuming the bird’s liver to regain strength and prepare to take the sacred fire again.

The reversal does not erase the violence of the myth or its unequal struggle. It changes what the vulture signifies: the creature remains a force of suffering, but its power is no longer the final word. Prometheus’s escape and renewed attempt make endurance active rather than merely passive.

The Artist’s Reversal

Romain Gary identifies Prometheus as an artist. In the retelling, artistic identity is expressed through the refusal to accept the ending assigned by the gods: Prometheus breaks free, appropriates the source of his torment, and turns back toward the stolen fire. The vulture thus becomes part of a story about making something out of adversity rather than submitting to it.

This mythic answer follows the narrator’s recollection of seeing his mother gravely ill and asking whether life was an honorable endeavor or should be rejected. He responds by writing a story about Prometheus. The creature’s role in that story gives imaginative form to a choice for continued life: suffering remains real, but it need not dictate the ending.

A Recurring Figure of Survival

The vulture image crosses from the embedded myth into the narrator’s account of his own physical suffering. He connects the myth’s liver to his continuing digestive troubles, describing himself as having endured a vast succession of vultures. The joke makes the mythical ordeal personal without equating the narrator’s illness with Prometheus’s punishment: the bird becomes a comic measure of how long suffering can persist.

That persistence belongs to a broader pattern in the memoir. The narrator recalls being declared near death during a severe kidney illness, and later describes surviving typhoid after a prolonged, dangerous illness. Those episodes establish recurrence and survival as important parts of his story; the vulture image specifically gives that recurrence a mythic and self-mocking expression, rather than appearing as a literal presence in the medical scenes.

Narrative Significance

The creature’s significance lies in the change from tormentor to material for resistance. Its place in the revised myth brings together bodily vulnerability, the prospect of death, and artistic invention: Prometheus’s ordeal is not denied, but the expected conclusion is refused. The narrator’s humor performs a related reversal, making the image of repeated suffering serve as evidence of persistence.

The ending extends the image beyond Prometheus. Romain Gary imagines that when the final attack drives him from his rock, a new sign might appear in the Zodiac: a human creature clinging to a celestial vulture. The possibility is deliberately fanciful, but its direction is clear. The vulture remains formidable, while the human figure’s continued grip turns endurance itself into a defiant, unfinished act.