51 pages • 1 hour read
E. L. DoctorowCity of God
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 167-205Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 167-183 Summary
Another long “Author’s Bio” section begins, this time about Everett’s brother Ronald and his experiences as part of a WWII bomber crew. After briefly describing his brother’s birth and his father slipping into the middle-aged man Everett knew growing up, Everett muses on the nature of the B-17 Flying Fortress, then begins his story in earnest:
After a number of missions, Ronald is given a weekend pass and sent to a small English castle where he was hosted by an unnamed Lord and his daughter, who Ronald calls Miss Manderleigh. Ronald and Manderleigh are caught in a rainstorm while touring the castle grounds, and they retreat to the barn, where they have sex; Ronald was hesitant with details, so Everett turns it into a romantic, tragic scene. They have sex again after her father goes to bed, and when the weekend is over, Ronald feels no lingering feelings for her as they say their goodbyes, instead seeing the “genderless sad soul that stared from her eyes” (174).
Twenty-four hours later his crew is sent on a large mission that takes a disastrous turn, as the squadron and its accompanying fighter planes are decimated. His plane is shot, and he rushes to the cockpit, where the copilot is dead. Ronald watches the horror and devastation unfold in the sky from his new station, and after successfully dropping their bombs, he and the pilot realize their flight controls are malfunctioning. The plane and its remaining crew are forced to reduce altitude and fly their broken plane deeper into enemy territory.
Everett writes a brief interlude about the horrors of war before returning to what his brother was likely thinking in that moment: of his mother and father and kid brother back home. Eventually, Ronald bails out with the rest of the crew, and Everett returns to the bar scene where he is telling these stories, saying that as Ronald parachuted, he shouted goodbye to Miss Manderleigh before coming to the ground in a World War I battlefield that has been exhumed by the bombs the Americans have been dropping. He spends the night in the bones of his father’s generation before being found by a French peasant. The French resistance employs him fixing radios and then helps smuggle him home. Soon he is back flying again, which is where Everett chooses to leave his story: “In the war after the war… before the war” (183).
Pages 184-205 Summary
Everett gets a file from the Justice Department via Sarah that documents her father’s attempts to have Schmitz—who has immigrated to America under an assumed name—tried for his crimes. The case is still open without conclusive evidence to identify him. This leads Everett to begin another fiction about a retired New York Times reporter who has feelings of bitterness about his life as a rule-following daily reporter. The reporter goes through a crisis of faith in himself and his life before settling on what to do with his retirement. He has long hated the unfinished, unsatisfying stories that journalism mandates, particularly those about dictators and despots who get unsatisfying ends. He decides that he will be the person who provides satisfying moral closure to these stories, beginning with an unnamed S.S. officer in Cincinnati who is clearly modeled on Schmitz.
It is revealed that when Joshua was killed, Tom accompanied Sarah to Europe, and they arrived while he was still in the hospital. As Sarah mourned, Tom collected Joshua’s things, including his detailed notes about his attempts to find the missing archive. This is followed by an extensive listing of all the Jewish objects that were taken and catalogued by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
Missing his friend Pem and anxious to hang out with Sarah alone lest he betray his growing feelings for her, Everett goes to her Friday night services to listen at her small experimental synagogue, which involves a question-and-answer deconstruction of doctrine. Sarah begins by asking about the soul, which leads her to talking about the Reconstructionism her congregation is engaging in. In her view, the irreverence for the doctrinal parts of religion is an attempt to get back to a state of unmediated awe, from which they can begin to really understand their faith.
Everett returns to his story of the reporter. He flies to Cincinnati and begins his stakeout, thinking as he does that he still has the lingering habits of being an observer, not a person who takes action. He drives through the S.S. officer’s neighborhood a few times before buying a bike so he can be less suspicious. He is riding the bike, thinking about buying a gun and how we will go about killing the officer, when he loses control of his bike and accidentally crashes into the very man he was thinking of murdering. The S.S. officer dies on the spot, and the ex-reporter, frustrated at the outcome, flees the scene and flies home. He reads about the hit-and-run later, noting that the paper reports that the man was an alleged S.S. officer but also that his neighbors found him to be a charming old man.
There is a brief segment about the nature of songs in which Everett notes that the most memorable songs are the simplest and resemble hymns. Everett then relays that Pem has successfully recovered the ghetto archive, which seems to have revitalized his old friend. During his trip, Pem is able to retrace Joshua’s steps and meet with Josip, an altar boy for Father Petrauskas, the man who kept the ghetto archive. Josip tells him that the Russians boxed up the archive and it is currently in the hands of the KGB. Pem tracks the archive down and convinces the Russian government to sell it to him.
It takes a few weeks for arrangements to be made with the Justice Department, in case the archive is useful in the open Schmitz case, but the day comes that Pem and Sarah drive to the airport to open the archive for the first time. Pem worries that his motives in all of this may have been impure, and Sarah has growing feelings for him as well, but the opening is a somber occasion. They go through it together and see that it documents the slow dehumanization of the Jewish people; the Justice Department officials are confident that it can be used in the Schmitz case and in many other open cases.
The officials leave Sarah and Pem alone together, and Pem sees that this moment is what a new church should aspire to be. Sarah goes through a small pile of black-and-white photos until she comes across a group of young boys dressed in the way her father described the council runners he worked with. Her father is pictured with them.
Pages 167-205 Analysis
The second “Author’s bio” section does much of the same work as the first, positioning Everett as someone who is tangentially connected to the great conflicts of the 20th century and creating a sense of connection between those and his everyday existence. He also connects the trauma his brother experienced to his father, dropping him in the same battlefields that his father fought in—the novel is making a case for the existence of generational trauma and the cyclical nature of horrific violence: “[…] the war after the war… before the war” (183).
The novel then introduces a new element in the form of Everett’s story about the ex-Times reporter who is reconceiving of himself as an agent of justice. It’s telling that the ex-reporter’s attempt to kill a figure that is closely modeled on Schmitz is successful but unsatisfying (as is the reporter’s second attempt, which ends in a similar cosmic-accident death rooted in the absurd), as it reiterates one facet of the issue the novel is grappling with: the world is chaotic, random, and cruel, and the meaning that humans impose on it has little power. It’s also another glimpse into Everett’s own struggle with faith and meaning, as his writing has slowly been moving away from an assured worldview of narrative and moral simplicity into an embrace of the fractured view that he’s been discussing with Pem; his writing has come a long way from the hard-boiled religious detective that he first envisioned in writing about Pem, and though he still embodies a secular viewpoint, his faith in narrative is shaken.
This all dovetails well with the recovery of the ghetto archive, as it represents history in the actual instead of as a narrative. When Pem sees it as the image of what a new church should be, it seems to answer the central conflict in his view of religion—it’s the whole picture, taking the everyday texture of the place into account and documenting the small details that add up to the total dehumanization of a people. It is an important symbol for the characters: for Sarah, it’s the confirmation of her father’s story (not that she needed it) and a resolution to her dead husband’s search; for Pem, it’s a new way of looking at faith and the answer to the “sign” of the stolen cross; for Everett, it’s both the resolution to the narrative of the novel he wants to write and the artifact that shows him how impossible it would be to write a novel that grapples with all this while using traditional modes of narrative. It is as though the ghetto archive is the real, historical wilderness, and Biblical narrative is the symbolic forty days that Jesus spent in the desert.
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By E. L. Doctorow
