[I worked on "Jonah" throughout the summer of 1991, and when I finished it in early fall, I sent a copy to my friend and fellow short-story writer Geoff Wyss. A few weeks later, the following critique showed up in my mailbox. - KH]
I have just finished reading "The Gospel According to Jonah" for the first time, and I want to get some of my thoughts down before I forget them. The story, as I think it is supposed to, has sort of set my head reeling, so some of what I say will probably make sense with the way you see the story, and some of it will probably not. But in general, I think I have a handle on a couple of the important currents running through the story . I'm going to stick my neck out a bit by drawing a diagram which I constructed in my mind as I read to help me understand what was happening, to which I'll refer now and again as I write my comments:
God [the Christian God in all His Glory]
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The Narrator [god of Jonah's story]
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Jonah
Now, I've written quite a bit on the story itself as I read, so some of what I say here will sound like repetition, and I may have expressed myself better in the written comments. What I am saying is: read both this and my written comments in conjunction, and they should add up to a remotely unified vision of the story.
The first real jolt you give to the reader is in the second section of the story, p.2, when the narrator identifies himself as the God who sent Jonah the dream, and presents himself as a very manipulative sort of being, playing with Jonah for what seems like almost no reason at all, or at least a reason the reader cannot see yet. As I try to indicate in the things I have written on that page, you are asking me as a reader to do some very difficult mental acrobatics to "stay with" the story. Most stories present a character who the reader can assume is "real", as much a person as the reader himself; this is what usually makes fiction so worthwhile - that it shows us people very much like ourselves dealing with similar problems. But, when the narrator tells me outright that Jonah is not by any stretch of the imagination real, then I realize that your story is not at all within the tradition of what we might call "regular" stories, and I have to try to figure out how you want me to react. I think most readers tend to bring a free-floating empathy to stories, which they attempt to attach to the main character right away; in other words, we look for a protagonist when we read, someone to identify with. Well, when you tell me Jonah is not real, that he is essentially so many words on a page and no more, you pull the rug out from under the empathy I had already begun to feel for Jonah. But, you introduce another character at the same time: the narrator. In fact, within a few short lines, I became much more interested in the narrator as a character than in Jonah - what makes this voice tick? Why does he want to manipulate Jonah? Why does he want to tell me this story? And, exactly who is he? - when I think about this narrator, am I supposed to picture a human being somewhere writing a story, or is he only meant to be a disembodied voice? In short, I begin psychologizing this guy, because for some odd reason he has chosen to tell me a story, and I want to know why. And Jonah, as I've said, loses interest for me. A chess game might be a good analogy: watching a chess game, I don't care at all for the physical pieces on the board; what interests me are the strategies of the players. And Jonah is very much like a chess piece in this story.
Now you see the basic assumption I made in reading this story. Everything I say from here on out is based on that basic idea that I'm supposed to give most of my attention to the narrator as a character, and pay attention to what happens to Jonah mostly to help figure out the guy who's making him do these things. This is a very complicated assumption, no? But, this is a very complicated story, with several levels, and a story that doesn't admit a very simplistic view of reality. It's the sort of story that makes me stretch my brain. So, with my assumption exposed, let me go on with how I read the rest of the story.
Any good story has some sort of conflict, and for me the center of the narrator's conflict (remember, he's my protagonist) shows up in a couple of his comments on p.7. The first comment is about creating Jonah's world on "the living-room floor". This paragraph seems to show me a narrator far more like an actual human than I had understood up to this point in the story - a real, live person, lying on his living-room floor and constructing a story, much like any real person would. The second comment I want to bring to attention is just below this: "I still believed in God then, of course." These two comments, considered together, undeniably separate the narrator [god of the story] from God [the Christian God in all his glory] (see diagram above). (Up to this point in the story, I wasn't sure there actually was a difference, and the passage I blocked out on p.4 actually muddled the issue for me quite a bit.) [Based on this feedback, I rewrote page 4 to make the distinction between the narrator and the Christian God more clear. This also provided an earlier introduction to the story's central conflict, and made it more obvious that the narrator is a regular person in the "real" world. - KH] Not only are the narrator and God irretrievably separated, but the second comment I pointed out actually belies some tension between the two, or what I would call the narrator's central conflict. Let me put it another way: I think the narrator's "problem" is how to deal with, how to understand, God. I hope I'm hitting the mark here, because there are really no more clues to this conflict as concrete as this one on p.7, unless it is the rather ironic tone the narrator takes toward his own role as god in Jonah's story.
I realize this is all getting rather complicated.
Of course.
But, when I sensed the narrator's struggle with the concept of God as the conflict, everything began to click into place for me. I went back to my original question: why has he decided to write this story, in which the plays the part of the ultimate manipulator? What makes him want to jerk Jonah around like this? Answer: because he is transferring to Jonah his own grief at the hand of God, a God he simply cannot understand, no matter how hard he tries. He manipulates Jonah the way God manipulates him. Or, to put it another way: he plays god in Jonah's story, trying to locate the perverse satisfaction God must feel in manipulating him, the narrator. This idea of transference of grief is at the heart of my diagram; the grief flows downward. It would be no surprise if, in the part of Jonah's life we don't see, he owns a mouse or a dog which he puts through weird, meaningless paces, essentially playing God with it.
To further this idea: I notice that even though the narrator laughs at the idea of God sending His son to earth to die for humanity, he cannot resist sending an incarnation of himself down to Jonah's "earth" in much the same way, an incarnation that parodies Jesus in a couple of salient ways. The narrator cannot help playing god, but he keeps doing it in a way that parodies God.
The last scene of the story, Jonah and the incarnate narrator on the island, seems to reinforce the way I read the story as well. It is here that the narrator seems to be grappling with the irrationality of the idea of God. I think the narrator is identifying with Jonah in this scene as well, seeing himself as a sort of Jonah, transferring his confusion about God onto the character of Jonah. I think that the narrator would like to tell God the things which Jonah tells the narrator in this last scene: that He doesn't make any sense, that He's a bastard, etc. And when Jonah admits that what he really wants is simply to be free, I think it is really the narrator about whom we are supposed to understand this. But, it is not so be so. The narrator, in the last section, seems to admit defeat, to admit and lament that God is in fact in control of his life, and that there's nothing he can do about it. Jonah's last name is ironic, of course, in the same way the narrator's name for himself, "God", is ironic; neither of them is free.
I just finished reading the story a second time. There's really not a whole lot I want to add to my typed comments - I still understand the story generally in the same way, though I had a lot more basic fun this time through, and I don't think my comments really express how enjoyable this story is to read. Many of the sentences and paragraphs show a real facility with language which was to some extent missing in your earlier stories. The dialogue is especially enjoyable. Good writing.
-- G.