My contribution to this year's conference of the Modern Language Association is an inquiry which can hardly be reduced to concrete terms: Meaning and Destiny in Western Literature. And yet our attention is to be engaged by five concrete literary figures—symbolic not only of the spirit of the people in whose languages they originated, but of the spirit and soul of the European community as a whole. They have been familiar to you from your youth—as familiar as the skyline of your native mountains, or your cities, or as any landmark in the town of your childhood: Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust.