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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________8-16-10 I, _________________________________________________________,Charles Green hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy in: English and Comparative Literature It is entitled: The Gospels of Faith and Doubt: A Novel This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________Michael Griffith _______________________________Leah Stewart _______________________________Jay Twomey _______________________________ _______________________________ The Gospels of Faith and Doubt: A Novel A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English of the College of Arts and Sciences by Charles Green M.A. University of Missouri May 2003 Committee Chair: Michael Griffith Abstract The Gospels of Faith and Doubt: A Novel explores the relationship between knowledge and belief. The narrator, Thomas Miller, tells the story of his best friend from childhood, Adam Ellison, who claims to be the second son of God. Though Thomas doubts the existence of God, much less Adam’s divinity, from an intellectual perspective, often he feels an instinctive, emotional pull toward faith. To reconcile these contradictory views, he writes the story of Adam’s life in two parts: one as a straightforward biography or memoir, the other as his own Gospel version of Adam’s life. With that structure in mind, the novel carries forward the structural interests of such novels as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright. That dual structure allows me to merge two diverse traditions of fiction: the realistic and the speculative. Merging those traditions enables the novel to investigate the relationship between one’s experience of life and one’s interpretation of the mystical events of Christian texts. iii iv Table of Contents January 10: The Books ................................................................................................................... 1 January 8: The Dawn of Christendom ............................................................................................ 5 January 9: Our Fathers.................................................................................................................. 20 Chapter and Verse—The First Gospel.......................................................................................... 29 January 10: You Will Surely Die, You Will Not Surely Die ....................................................... 31 January 11: The Acts of Acolytes................................................................................................. 41 Chapter and Verse: An Acolyte .................................................................................................... 54 January 12: Methods and Madness............................................................................................... 55 Chapter and Verse: God’s Young Son.......................................................................................... 71 January 13: The Lost Prayer of Chicken Little............................................................................. 74 Chapter and Verse: The Conversion of the Doubter..................................................................... 85 January 14: Schism ....................................................................................................................... 88 Note to Self ................................................................................................................................. 115 January 15: Graduation............................................................................................................... 118 Chapter and Verse: The Gospel of the Wilderness..................................................................... 130 January 16: Undeclared .............................................................................................................. 138 Chapter and Verse: The Parable of the Digger ........................................................................... 161 January 17: The Greatest of These is Love................................................................................. 166 Chapter and Verse: The Lost Apostle Found.............................................................................. 204 January 18: A New World .......................................................................................................... 206 January 19: To Dust.................................................................................................................... 236 v Chapter and Verse: The Torture of Christ .................................................................................. 252 January 20: Aftermath ................................................................................................................ 256 January 21: The News Today, Oh Boy....................................................................................... 268 Chapter and Verse: The Torture of Christ, con’t ........................................................................ 276 January 21: Good News.............................................................................................................. 279 January 22: Cruciform ................................................................................................................ 292 Epistle ………………………………………………………………………………………… 300 January 30-31: Last Days ........................................................................................................... 306 Chapter and Verse: The Death of Christ..................................................................................... 314 February 1: Brief Sentence ......................................................................................................... 319 Chapter and Verse: Death and Resurrection............................................................................... 321 February 2: Revelations .............................................................................................................. 322 Beyond Literary Fiction: Clarifying the Creative-Writing Classroom....................................... 324 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 346 vi January 10: The Books I’m writing two books. One I'm going to burn; the other will change the world. Either way, it’s time people knew the truth about Adam Ellison, the second son of God. I don’t know which book is which. One is a gospel, the good news of Adam, what I want desperately to believe. I should also confess to you that for much of my life, I’ve had no faith in God. Not that I haven’t wanted to. But as little as I do believe, when I write Adam’s gospel I’m inspired akin to Saint Matthew receiving the word. My breath seems more tangible than vapor; the words make sense. Even if I can’t believe, I can write as if I do. But there is the other book, the one that’s fact. If Adam’s followers want a messiah, they need to know what they're praying (and paying) for. Other than the ridiculous miracle of his birth, which his mother fed him, he’s never claimed what others profess him to be. He speaks, people listen; he walks, people follow. After that, they make him what they want him to be: prophet, messiah, the Word itself. I started writing these books after my father’s funeral, the first hour I got home. Adam is responsible for his death, my mother’s too. He may not have had his hand on the throat, but he had that other bludgeon, his voice. What’s worse, if Adam is responsible for my father’s death, I don’t know whether I’m angry or not. Because—and this is the confession that keeps me up at night—I want very deeply to believe in Adam. Not necessarily that he’s the Messiah they claim, but that what he preaches is true. I want to trust some God’s out there watching us, listening when we whisper, listening when we don’t. 1 And my parents’ deaths aren’t the only ones Adam is responsible for. In the summer of 2000, a man long homeless walked into a Cleveland shelter, where he ate a meal of soup and cornbread, and took a shower. He told everyone who would listen that he was the happiest man alive. Those familiar with him, volunteers and employees and regulars, knew him to be unstable, manic-depressive, but as he shared his joy his demeanor was a smiling calm. Later, everyone who spoke to him reflected on how happy they’d been in his company that evening, especially compared to how uneasy he usually made them, experienced as they were with agitation. People asked him the secret of his happiness, and he said, repeatedly, “I am myself. I’m in control.” The next morning, police discovered him hanged from a bridge by his belt. All they found in his pockets was a note on shelter stationery that read, in neat script, “Thank you Adam.” In the fall of 2001, an accountant named Terry Becker leapt from the 90th floor of a burning building to his death. That night, Adam Ellison appeared at Becker’s apartment and spoke with his widow, Alison, for hours. The content of that conversation remains unknown. Three days later, when media asked how she was, she replied, “He’s okay.” Did she understand he was dead? She nodded. “I know that. But he’s okay.” A year past the interview,