Kim is an instructor of English literature in North Carolina. In this essay, she considers Ellison's critique of progress and conformity in modern society in his short story.

In Ovid's Metamorphosis, Aeneas encounters a decrepit Sibyl, or soothsayer, in Cumae who had once pointed to a mound of sand and wished for her life to be as long in years as the number of grains of sand in the pile. Apollo, trying to seduce her by granting her wishes, but unable to forgo the duplicity of his immortal kind, did not reveal her wish's fatal flaw: she had wished for eternal life, but not eternal youth. By the time she meets Aeneas, she has accepted that instead of prolonging her enviable beauty, she has unwittingly chosen for herself a protracted and painful senescence (the state of becoming old). As an old crone, she is no threat to...