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Jack Ortiz
Jennifer Ladino
ENGL 490
12 November 2013
Empathy and the Reading Experience: Analyzing Denis Johnson’s Craft in Jesus’ Son
A creative writing teacher of mine once told me that fiction is about revealing the
complexity of people, that it is foremost about character. However, there is a very important
character that often goes overlooked in fiction, and that is the reader. To include the reader in the
story to such an extent without blatantly asking the reader to imagine himself in the text,
narrative empathy must be accomplished. Patrick Hogan addresses the empathy readers feel for
fictional characters. He claims that such empathy was pertinent to our survival as a species. If we
imagined a fictional situation that could be dangerous, then we are less likely to pursue that
situation if our imagination is vivid. Hogan writes, “The emotion is a crucial part of the function
of imagination. Thus this account leads us to expect emotional responses to fiction . . . Finally
this model indicates that we should respond more forcefully to more detailed and more concrete
images” (246). Suzanne Keen adds to this discussion by saying that point of view in literature as
well as the relationship between narrator, characters, and reader are important elements of
narrative empathy. She quotes Wayne Booth: “If an author wants intense sympathy for characters
who do not have strong virtues to recommend them, then the psychic vividness of prolonged
inside views will help him” (219). How does such empathy for an immoral narrator affect the
reader’s sense of morality? I claim that such narrative empathy drives the readers into a
questioning of their moral outlook, ultimately leading to a transcendent reading experience.
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In Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, the readers are engaged such that they participate in the
fictional story, Johnson evokes empathy for the narrator, and invades the readers’ sense of
morality, causing them to question it in light of their perception of the story. Most people
wouldn’t think that such an invasion into their morality would be possible with an
unsophisticated, immoral narrator such as the nameless man in Jesus’ Son. But through
meticulous craft, Johnson manages to include the reader in an elaborate discussion about the
morality of perception and what it means to be a witness to actions we generally define as
immoral. Johnson utilizes setting, narrative voice, tone, metafictional elements, and other
stylistic elements to evoke empathy for the narrator, and this empathy is used in such a way that
penetrates the reader’s moral outlook. For this discussion, we will examine the first and last
stories in Jesus’ Son (“Car Crash While Hitchhiking” and “Beverley Home,” respectively) in
order to uncover the craft behind such an effect.
Jesus’ Son is a collection of short stories all from the perspective of the same narrator,
whose only name given in the collection is the one his acquaintances have given him: Fuckhead.
This narrator travels through life as an immoral drug addict and finds himself in various
situations but never seems to be the one finding these situations for himself. Such a narrator
creates an existential foundation for the stories. Anything could happen here, and it would be up
to the reader to judge these occurrences for the narrator, because the narrator relies on passivity
as a mechanism for coping with them and for coping with his actions.
We all know about the “iceberg” principle, where only ten percent of what is going on is
actually written; where there is a deep, underlying reserve of emotion that the sentence suggests
but does not tell. Johnson incorporates this same principal when revealing his narrator’s
perception of the action. The writing is through the perception of the narrator’s intoxicated blur
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of things. It is blurred but not by critical discrimination of the intellect. It works to orient the
reader with the narrator’s delayed thought process. We gather the sensory details from the
narrator’s distant mind, but the result is proximity to the narrator. Much of the details are
fabrications of Fuckhead’s mind that he does not have control over. As J. Scott Farrin says, “For
the characters of the modern novel, life is done to them,” (131). To render such passivity,
Johnson puts us in the mind of the narrator, as his mind is done to him. He is someone who
accepts thoughts and perceptions as they occur to him, rather than trying to make sense of them.
Farrin says “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” locates Fuckhead within an “existential space
. . . at the whim of chance and his addictions” (138). In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” Johnson
writes “My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it
happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the
sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm” (3). Fuckhead is
stoned, and therefore does not question his newfound prescience or the raindrops who all seem to
have names. Johnson chooses to write like this because it gives us the raw experience of
someone on drugs. It is Fuckhead’s existential instinct to allow his consciousness to carry on as
it does without the intellect. To create this existential atmosphere, Johnson specifically employs
the character’s passive thoughts into the action. He says, regarding his prediction of the car
crash: “I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way” (3). Fuckhead enters the car, knowing
it will crash because he hears the phrase “we will take you all the way,” but doesn’t comprehend
where exactly they will take him. The reader is not told this; all we are given is “They said
they’d take me all the way,” which is strange for a sober readership to encounter, but justifies his
apathy at entering a car he knows is going to crash. If he believes he can sense the future, then it
makes sense that he also believes strangers will take him to his unknown destination. While it is
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strange for the reader, unquestioned statements like this invite one into the narrator’s mind; they
encourage us to withhold logical discrimination.
Johnson also uses pacing to create such an existential, passive tone. Tom Grimes
describes this story’s tempo as “at a walking pace” based on its sentence structure. He quotes
Johnson: “The clouds stayed the same until night. Then, in the dark, I didn’t see the storm
gathering. The driver of the Volkswagen, a college man, the one who stoked my head with all the
hashish, let me out beyond the city limits just as it began to rain” (Johnson, 5). Grimes says
Johnson uses “multiple commas and subordinate clauses to slow its pace” (96). The subordinate
clauses “in the dark” and “a college man, the one who stoked my head with all the hashish,”
cause the reader to pause in the middle of the sentence and acknowledge the multiple
occurrences within the scene that are not specifically detailed. This allows Johnson to express a
long period in a short sentence.
Such pacing also reflects the narrator’s intoxication. At the end of the story, the narrator
flashes forward to a time when he is at a hospital detox center. He passes out and then wakes up
on his stomach with a nurse injecting vitamins into his arm. There is a change in the sentence
structure here, reflecting his switch from intoxication to sobriety. It is minimalistic and quick: “It
was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek
rushing down among rocks,” (10). One cannot talk about minimalistic without mentioning
Hemingway. Sheldon Norman Grebstein acknowledges Hemingway’s concentration “on little
physical actions and on basic sensations” (83) in “Big Two-Hearted River” to replicate the
protagonists condition, which is distrustful of the intellect due to wartime experiences. Such a
distrust of the intellect is also the case at the end of “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” The narrator
is experiencing sobriety for the first time in what was evidently a long stretch of drug use. He is
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on his stomach in this scene as a nurse injects him with vitamins. As he comes to, it is apparent
to the reader that he doesn’t have control over the situation. He wakes up on his stomach and
asks, “How did the room get so white?” (10). His regard to the color of the room, as well as to
the nature outside the building, is odd. Why isn’t he asking about his position and what happened
before he woke? It is because he must actively avoid thoughts about himself and his situation.
The details come as a list: Rain. Ferns. Forest. Creek. He must focus on one detail at a time, and
continually search for more details if he is to avoid contemplation on his own helplessness.
After this list of sensory details, the narrator seems to step outside of the story and speak
directly to the reader. He says, “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you,”
(10). In the earlier passages I’ve mentioned, while Johnson uses past tense, he refrains from any
“real-time” speculation on the story. Here, in the very last sentence, he breaks that tendency. In
the context of the story he seems to ask, how could you expect me to rescue a baby from a car
crash when I can’t even take care of myself? However, he uses the word “you” four times in this
sentence, accusing the reader, asking us how we could be so ignorant to his deformity as to
expect things from him. It is also important to note that Johnson switches to the present tense
here because it suggests present speculation – a narrator who has had time to think about this
with a sober mind, which seems to validate the accusation to the reader.
This final line does something even more interesting: it includes the reader into the story.
It forces the reader to ask the question: where do I stand in all this? The narrator assumes that the
reader stands on the sidelines, judging his actions, which will correct in most cases, as the
immorality of the narrator at times is stunning. As readers, we expect the narrator to abide
common morality, but he seems to think this is itself immoral of us. Johnson chooses to make
this sentence the last thing he says before kicking off the rest of the stories because he wants us
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as readers to question our moral outlook in the context of the following stories/situations. He
does not explicitly ask us to do so; instead, he accuses us, which is much more powerful.
Timothy L. Parrish points to themes regarding resurrection in Jesus’ Son. He says that
“Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” places the reader in the middle of a birth or rebirth using
sentence fragments and metaphor. The story begins with three fragments connected by ellipses.
The ellipses, Parrish claims, “suggest the intervals of space between the travelers who,
unknowingly, will come together through their interaction with the narrator, two of them literally
and fatally in a terrible crash.” The narrator is introduced with, “I rose up sopping wet” (Johnson,
3). The phrase “I rose up” suggests the theme of resurrection at which the title hints. Parrish
identifies the structure of the story: Fuckhead describes the family in the Oldsmobile and then
doubles back to recount his travels with three other people. What is interesting about this recount
is that nothing explains his current, prescient state of consciousness. Parrish says “Something
similar happens to the readers of the story because Johnson transforms them into helpless
witnesses . . . to a tragedy that they are powerless to avoid” (Parrish). Parrish suggests that
Johnson has forced his readers into participating in the accident as onlookers. Such participation
causes the readers to reconsider their own morality: What is the moral interpretation of this story
and moral judgment of this narrator? With the last sentence of the story, he challenges the
morality of the audience’s perception.
Parrish mentions a line in a later story, where Fuckhead has become a voyeur and
wonders if his audience should be appalled at the extent to which he can debase himself. Parish
points out the irony that Johnson has anticipated this question, and that the readers themselves
have already become voyeurs when they accepted the narrator’s invitation in the first story to
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gaze at his revolting life. Thus the collection includes the reader’s ongoing participation,
constantly questioning the morality of our perception.
Much of our perception of the stories is influenced by the violent actions. One thing
Johnson does not shy away from is violent details. When the narrator leaves the car and walks
past the one they crashed into, he sees a man dangling from the passenger’s door. Johnson writes,
“He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He
wouldn’t be taking many more” (8). Where, according to Cirino, Hemingway sought to write
violence with cold objectivity, Johnson shapes the reader’s response by including the narrator’s
thoughts. He focuses less on the dying person's demeanor and more on how the narrator
responds. He uses cold objectivity to describe the death, but then continues, “I knew that, but he
didn’t, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t
mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he
was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real” (8). Here, we see the narrator’s demeanor
more than that of the dying man. Fuckhead holds sacredness in what he and the dying man do
not have access to. The great pity is that they cannot communicate the shocking details of this
person’s death to each other, that there is no conversation from which the narrator can see how
this person handles death. But the pity is the person’s life, not the narrator’s knowledge. It is pity
that person dies ignorant to his death, that he isn’t given a chance to respond to it.
As I’ve said earlier, the reader is forced to participate as an onlooker, which is a
metafictional aspect that works to put us in the shoes of the narrator. It is important that the
reader is put in the perspective of an onlooker because this story concerns an onlooker. The
reader sees the narrator’s response first hand, and then later on in the story, there is another scene
involving death, but the perspective is different. Fuckhead is in the emergency waiting room. The
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wife of the man who just died comes in, but she does not yet know he is dead. Johnson writes,
“We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us” (9). It appears that the narrator has
occupied the reader’s previous position: that of the onlooker to the person responding to another
person’s death. This power derives from their anticipation to the widow’s reaction. Anything she
does at this moment holds great stakes for the narrator. The doctor leads the wife behind the door
and Fuckhead hears her scream: “What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagine an eagle would
shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone searching for that feeling everywhere”
(9). Jack Miles says regarding this passage that due to the language’s “brokenness, its brevity,
and the sense it conveys of the speaker’s opacity to himself, it is uniquely realistic about the
character’s inner life” (Miles). This passage reveals that the narrator is more affected by the
widow’s response than his own witnessing of the death.
The collection’s last story, “Beverly Home,” details Fuckhead’s experiences working at a
nursing home. The reader is included in this story through snippets of narration that act as asides
to the reader. Johnson's use of the second-person pronouns and first-person plural pronouns act to
invoke empathy for the narrator as they identify the reader with him. The narrator begins the
story by describing the deformities of the people living there. He says, “You and I don’t know
about these diseases until we get them, in which case we also will be put out of sight,” (116).
Here the narrator feels normal by juxtaposition to these residents. He equates himself with the
reader, as having this common ground with them. Of course, to the reader, Fuckhead appears as
deformed as any of them, though morally instead of physically or mentally. Within two pages of
this instance, Johnson does it again, describing one of the residents of the nursing home, “He was
completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other” (118).
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Here, Fuckhead allows criticism of himself; however he will not be criticized alone. He equates
himself with the reader again, suggesting that we are all a mess, all deformed in latent ways.
Throughout “Beverley” Johnson offers glimpses into people's lives (some deformed, and
others abnormal in some other manner) as a way to alienate the reader with the narrator. First he
describes the residents of the nursing home, revealing the proportions of their deformities as well
as their loneliness. He then narrows in on one person: a young, female Mennonite whom he
peeps on every day on his way to the bus stop. In his first encounter, he is absorbed by the
woman’s beautiful voice, and her “virginal” demeanor; nothing about the way she touches
herself is sensual, he notices, but that makes it more interesting for him. He narrates, “I had
thoughts of breaking through the glass and raping her. But I would have been ashamed to have
her see me. I thought I might be able to do something like that if I were wearing a mask” (11920). It is important to note the narrator’s impulse to remain hidden. If the woman were to see
him, he would completely lose interest, as Johnson writes: “She never did anything she might
have been embarrassed about, and I didn’t learn an of her secrets, though I wanted to, especially
because she didn’t know me. She probably couldn’t even have imagined me” (123).
The narrator’s desire for anonymity is persistent. For a few weeks he dates a woman who
is just over four feet tall and, medically speaking, a dwarf. He tells us how he makes love to her
on the sofa while television is playing. He says “They were stupid shows, Saturday-night shows.
But I was afraid to make love to her without the conversations and laughter from that false
universe playing in our ears, because I didn't want to get to know her very well, and didn't
want,[sic] to be bridging any silences with our own eyes” (122). Anonymity is the narrator's way
of resisting his own identification. It shows his insecurity with who he has become and sets us up
for his actualization into his new, sober lifestyle. Fuckhead's inclination to remain hidden is so
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apparent to the reader that it forces us to ask, why does he seek to be anonymous, yet choose us,
the readers, to confide in? What influence do we have on this narrator as the ones who listen to
his story? Here, our role as readers is illuminated as we adopt a sort of responsibility for him.
Ultimately, it is our role as listeners to his story to empathize with him and strive for him to
improve.
Fuckhead does not follow through with this desire to rape the woman. Instead he
continues to spy on her and her husband. Daniel W. Lehman says “for this couple, their practice-while exemplary and transforming--is turned inward, caught in its own reflection like the
woman's in the window.” Lehman points out a connection between theme and the concrete detail,
where the woman looks out the window, but can’t see Fuckhead standing right in front of it
because it is dark. She only sees her reflection. Johnson writes, “I could have touched a teardrop,
I stood that close,” (129). As in “Crash” Fuckhead is again on the sidelines of an event, not
participating. The action involving the couple is turned inward, meaning the narrator’s
transformation is only incidental to that of the couple. Where we find ourselves judging the
narrator, the couple is busy judging themselves, caught in their own reflection, not knowing quite
how to react morally. The narrator on the other hand allows himself to be touched by these
people. He describes himself standing at the window: “She didn’t move for a long while, not
perhaps for a full minute, which seemed like a very long time to me outside in the dark with a
great loneliness and the terror of a whole life not yet lived, and the TVs and garden sprinklers
making the noises of a thousand lives never to be lived, and the cars going by with the sound of
passage, movement, untouchable, uncatchable” (130). Johnson describes here the multitudes of
people the narrator cannot reach. It is apparent that Fuckhead is staring at his complete opposite
– pious Mennonites – and this is the “life not yet lived,” the one centered on spiritual and moral
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dedication. As in “Crash”, Johnson manages to place the reader in the shoes of a witness. The
narrator is on the sidelines again, and again he gains a revelation about what direction he wants
his life to head in. “Crash,” sent off the short story collection as Fuckhead realized his desire for
an extreme, excessive life where he goes “searching for that feeling everywhere” (9). In
“Beverley Home” the narrator finds terror in the prospect of a “life not yet lived” because he
knows it is one that he must confront full on; it is the life that will replace the one of excess.
Experiencing this scene as readers, we cannot help but discover the excess in our own lives as we
are juxtaposed by these pious Mennonites. The reader is the less moral character here because we
realize we have been distracted by our judgments from learning moral lessons. The Narrator
mentions his desire to rape the woman in order to invoke the our judgmental reading lens, and by
doing so, the reader is caught off guard in this scene where the narrator rises above judgment.
The reader gains a sense of community by the end as the character ‘Fuckhead’ earns our
understanding. The evocation of empathy shapes this community by inviting the reader into a
relationship with a narrator of a different culture and moral perspective than the reader. Such a
community is not blatantly stated; if the reader’s understanding was explicitly asked for (if this
connection was told instead evoked through the language) then it would not succeed in pushing
the reader’s moral judgment into a new lens. Such a lens – one that causes the reader to actualize
responsibility for the narrator, regardless of previous moral tenets – benefits writers who desire
an involved experience for their readers. Writing a story with this approach to the reading
experience will broaden an author's communication of themes; if a reader feels involved in a
story as a witness, then they will dig deeper for meaning than they would in story which doesn't
involve them. Readers will struggle with the story and analyze why it has led them to a moral
questioning; the story holds greater stakes, as the readers' own moral judgments of themselves
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are suddenly determined by their perceptions of a character they cannot predict. Something “at
stake” for the reader is not a common thread in fiction writing. The stakes usually belong to the
characters, and the challenge is getting the reader to care about the character enough to push for
him. Though present in metafiction, the “reader as character” device is usually more obvious,
whereas in Johnson's story, it is latent, and therefore the readers' defenses are down, allowing
them to be engaged and influenced on a subliminal level.
Metafictional stories such as Denis Johnson's also have much to offer readers who don't
have an interest in writing. A study done by psychologists Joan Peskin and Janet Wilde Astington
shows that metacognitive vocabulary, such as “think, know, remember, wonder, figure out, and
guess” is instrumental in learning for early education as it teaches children to recognize
perceptions (Zunshine). The perfect outlet for this is fiction, as it contains much more
metacognitive complexity than informational texts. Such complexity advances in work like
Johnson's where the reader is compelled to participate in the story; it challenges the reader to
comprehend multiple viewpoints at once. Lisa Zunshine explains the different levels of
“sociocognitive complexity”:
Think of sociocognitive complexity as triply nested mental states – a mental state
within a mental state within yet another mental state – as in, for instance, “I didn't
want (first mental state) him to know (second mental state) that I didn't like (third
mental state) his gift.” (Zunshine)
Zunshine claims that “social situations featuring third-level-nested mental states are the baseline
for fiction.” Fiction contains generally three levels of mental states, but I am going to define a
fourth: the reader. Participating in a fictional text creates complexity that challenges the readers'
comprehension and (potentially) their moral perspective. Now, this isn't to say that children
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should be reading Jesus' Son, but once children have a solid grasp on the “triply nested mental
states” in most fiction, they should be exposed to the fourth one. Continually challenging the
mind is paramount in education at all levels. Moreover, moral questioning is something that
should never cease, and fiction is a vessel for reminding us this.
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Works Cited
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Farrin, Scott J. “Eloquence and Plot in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son: The Merging of Premodern
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