"We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder"

The stories that lock together to make up The Gold Bug Variations are held together by common threads. One of those threads is the art of music. Several of the characters are heavily influenced by the melodies and harmonies that arise from the different scenes. The selection that I chose to dive deeper into and explore the many connections that music has to offer is from Variation III, section heading: "We Are Climbing Jacob's Latter." The particular part that grabbed my interest was the reference to Elvis changing the meaning of "Aura Lee" by releasing his variation of the song titled "Love Me Tender."

The section starts by Ressler entering the state of Illinois in 1957. He is coming to the state in order to start researching the code behind the science of Genetics. Up until this point Ressler had very little experience with music, knowledge that is made clear by his social interactions with his future coworkers and their families at the gathering. The passage on page 49 spells it out when it says that Ressler is "musically illiterate." This is given validity through the conversation between Ressler and Dr. Botkin in which Dr. Botkin makes reference to the "machine responsible for the apotheosis of Beethoven's Diabelli" and "the transcendent Opus 109 set." The machine that she is referring to is the piano, a fact that Ressler is unaware of due to his lack of understanding of the topic.

In attempt to clarify his lack of knowledge Ressler "buys a record player that folds up into a box." It is apparent that he is apprehensive to buy the record player, not only due to his frugality, but he is

worried about his genetic mutation of being tone-deaf. Ressler recalls that "he inherited what is physiologically ref...

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...h research that the Crux of the heart is the area of the junction of the walls of the four chambers of the heart. This was a truly "Ressler" observation, Ressler is the only man I know that could use his mind that is set in genetics and biology and apply it to a spiritual song and come out right. The research that I came up with also triggered a variation of the four chambers of the heart.

The four chambers of the heart link perfectly to the aria's four notes and to the four amino acids in genetics: A,C,T,and G. Those amino acids spring forth into the music of The Goldberg Variations due to the fact that it is the repetition of those core four notes that make up each variation as well as A,C,T, and G make up the variations of the human race. It is only fitting that Ressler saw the Crux of the heart, biology within music, and the biology within storytelling.