The Mahabharata

After reading the first the story, 'The Son of The Turtle-Spirit', I was rather looking forward to read the second myth story as the language used was rather simple and there were some sort of supernatural elements in the stories. In this story, there seemed to be a love at first sight situation when King Santanu proposed to the goddess Ganga upon seeing her. "You must certainly become my wife, whoever you may be." Although she had set some outrageous terms upon agreement to be his wife, the king still wanted to marry her. The decisions made by the king were indeed illogical because it was obvious that the goddness Ganga was a rather suspicious character and as a king, he can get anyone to marry him easily . Yet, he still obeyed to her requests. As the story developed further, the king's action became more insane when he chose to suffer in silence upon seeing his wife killed their children by casting them into the river, and then returned to the king with a smiling face. I think the king finally came to some senses when he stopped his wife from killing their eighth son. I did not understand the reasons why she had to kill her children and took her no eighth son with her and later returned him to the king. This story seemed somehow more complicated as it involved some aspects of the Hindus goddesses which I was not familiar with. The king and his son, Devavrata were happy with their life until the moment the king fell in love at the first sight for the second time with the beautiful maiden, the daughter of the chief of the fishermen. He wanted to marry her but the chief had requested that the son borne of this maiden should be the king after King Santanu. The king was wiser in making his decision as he was concerned about Devavrata. However when Devavrata knew about it, he on behalf of his father made an agreement with the chief so that the king will have the maiden as his spouse. Although the king seemed to be a weak character in this story, I did feel that he was a respectful character as he was loving toward his first wife and his son and tried to keep to his promise. Bhishma's willingness to give up the throne for his father's happiness made him a noble and godlike character. I believed that there might be some hidden message in this text and looked to the discussion in Dr. Edwin's class. Hopefully it matched my understanding of the text.