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.
Themes
The Existence of God in the Presence of Evil
The Holocaust looms large over the events of City of God, as do the horrors of war in general, and a driving conceit of Thomas Pemberton’s crisis of faith is his growing belief that his conception of God does not adequately account for injustice on such a scale. Everett’s friendship with Pem and eventually Sarah Blumenthal leads him to write several narratives that revolve around documenting the awful suffering that has occurred in the 20th century: a retelling of Sarah Blumenthal’s father’s experience in a Jewish ghetto, his own father’s experience as a signal corps member in World War I, his brother’s experience in World War II, and a fully-imagined narrative of a Vietnam veteran responding to Everett’s other narratives that notably points out how those other wars had a sense of justice as an end goal. Everett’s writing also imagines a retired reporter who is determined to end the lives of war criminals who have escaped justice. In each of these stories, horrible injustice is treated as an inevitable end result of humanity that will naturally turn toward conflict.
The novel offers up several possible answers to the question of how God fits into the modern world. Srebnitsky tells Yehoshua in the ghetto that God is uncaring—the God of Nazis as much as of miracles—but Yehoshua sees the way Nazis use numbers in the same way as the Jews as some evidence of divine meaning. Thomas Pemberton gives a prayer at his wedding reception that conveys an intense rage at the lack of justice in the world, ending with the notion that God must be reinvented. Sarah Blumenthal is already engaged in this work through her radical synagogue, stripping back all notions of religious meaning through analysis, irreverence, and reconstruction. The novel doesn’t provide the reader with a clear answer to whose view is correct or how to reconcile the notion of God with a century of horror, choosing instead to broaden the scope of the theme as it connects God to the power of secular art, physics, and societal organization.
The book ends with the question left open, but it does provide the reader with a place to start. In the closing pages, a city headed toward totalitarian rule is depicted, one in which God is used as an ideological cudgel against those without power, suggesting that the 21st century will see sectarian violence and genocide on a widening scale. The main characters of the story are revealed to be a version of Thomas and Sarah, two people engaged in the work of understanding and interpreting God for others. The novel calls them “heroes,” suggesting that seeking religious truth on its own terms, outside of the religious or societal structures that have been imposed upon it, is the real work necessary to understand God’s role going forward.
Narrative’s Relation to Lived Experience
The structure of the novel as Everett’s various drafts and notes toward a novel about the life of his friend Thomas Pemberton creates a natural disconnect between the events of the novel and the reader’s access to them. Everything is mediated through Everett’s experience and writing, and much of the plot is conveyed at a fictional remove or tangentially. Even the main character, Pemberton, is only introduced after a long section where he is presented as the character Everett is writing about: a hard-boiled, gritty, and jaded version of Pemberton who does not reflect the real man’s demeanor, even as the character shares his concerns and philosophy.
This creates a thread that will expand to include the Bible as a narrative and the narrative flattening of history, and the tension between the actual/historical and the invented drives the conversation Everett’s writer’s notebook is having with itself. Various narrative threads of his notebook—like his writing about Pemberton or the ghetto narrative—are largely dropped when his friends challenge their authenticity, and Everett’s growing obsession in the second half of the novel between the nature of film and literature indicate that he is attempting to reckon his craft with a sense of purpose that he thinks may be impossible. He wants to write something that captures his friend’s quest for meaning, but there is no way to do that without flattening it into a narrative truth, which Everett has grown deeply suspicious of as a means of doing meaningful work.
The “Author’s Bio” sections of the novel play with this idea as well, putting the stories of his family into juxtaposition with the moments they experienced in war that have become narratives in his family, bearing almost mythic weight. His father and brother were mundane, complex people in Everett’s life, but their war stories exist in epic time. Elsewhere, Everett tries to bring Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Sinatra to life as complete figures divorced from their place in history.
All of this is ultimately punctuated by the significance of the ghetto archive that Pemberton recovers: as an object, it serves to demystify and de-narrativize the Holocaust. It strips away the grand scope of suffering and instead renders it as a series of everyday, specific cruelties. It also mirrors the structure of the novel City of God; it is the narrative of the Holocaust before it was made into a narrative, much as the content of City of God is the raw material of the novel Everett intends to write about Pemberton. In this way, the form and meaning of the novel are in sync, and the novel makes an argument that traditional modes of narrative cannot effectively convey the scope of life in the 20th century.
Holistic Approaches to Understanding Modern Life
The novel’s structure as a writer’s notebook belies a deep distrust of written narrative due to its flattening, reductive effect on modern society’s perception of reality. Whether it’s the narrative rooted in religious doctrine or that of history, the simplifications that are introduced are untenable in the worldview of the novel. It’s notable that the book quotes one of Wittgenstein’s favorite phrases in its depiction of him, as the novel is concerned with approaching “everything that is the case,” much like Wittgenstein did in his writings.
The novel’s primary mode is expansion and reconsideration of ideas, which can be frustrating for readers looking for thematic resolution. Each narrative thread that the novel takes up is woven into other pieces of the text, whether directly through quotation and cross-reference or through thematic mirroring, and many times throughout the book, humanity is considered on a grand scale of organization that doesn’t lose the texture of the individual, as when Everett considers humanity’s relation to the colony of ants he finds in the park. Thomas even advocates for this approach to understanding God, saying that he will be found in an urban space and can only be understood through an appreciation of fragmentation and nuance. The novel takes place at the end of the millennium and during a time in which trust in institutions is fraying thanks to the events of the century and an increasing fragmentation of society brought on in part by the internet’s ability to decentralize thought. As such, it advocates for a decentralized, de-narrativized approach to apprehending the world.
The closing passage of the book lays this out most clearly as it creates a movie script that predicts the 21st century. Fragmentation will increase, God will become a weapon used by those in power, and totalitarianism will be embraced by many who are looking for the world to make sense. The novel rejects this coming future as the end result of people like Pemberton’s bishop, who would rather not question the established power structures and narratives, choosing instead to focus on two people like Sarah and Pem, who understand the value of working to sift through all the details and understand what’s vital and meaningful about existence. The novel doesn’t offer a final resolution to its central question; instead, it closes by showing that attempting to answer those questions is the only place to begin.
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By E. L. Doctorow
