CHRIST IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
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' McCaslin." The next "incarnation" is, inevitably, the Corporal of
A Fable,
who in the bloody conflicts of our time relives the life and
sacrifice of Christ, dying in the futile attempt to stop the carnage
of the First World War.
But Christ as a heroic model is not a curious obsession of Faulk–
ner alone. His Corporal was preceded by another, although in this
case a bitterly satirical, portrait of a present-day Christ, Nathanael
West's
Miss Lonelyhearts.
This tabloid advisor to the lovelorn and
distressed is weighed down by the misery of his clients and, bungling
his
impossible mission, he fails to fulfiIl the image of Christ and
is
shot by a desperate and misguided member of his flock. Further,
we have allusions to Christ in two other modem novels: in Thomas
Wolfe's
Of Ti'me and the River
in the death of old Grant, and in
the shooting and burial of Tod Clifton in Ralph Ellison's
Invisible
Man.
And in Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea,
the old
man's suffering is crowned by an analogy with Christ's passion. The
unlucky fisherman, returning from his battle with the sharks, beaten
but not defeated, carries home the mast of his ship, falling down re–
peatedly with the burden across his shoulders. In his . shack he lies
face down on his bed with his arms out straight and the palms of
his lacerated hands up. In this position he is discovered by his friend,
the young boy, who runs crying to tell others what he has seen.
The presence of and analogies to Christ in the work of Herman
Melville have been noted by many critics, and related to his exten–
sive use of symbolism. There is symbolism of this sort in
Moby
Dick
and, as Richard Chase maintains, under the surface in
Pierre.
In Melville's last work,
Billy Budd,
the figure of Christ emerges into
full light. BiIly Budd, a "martyr to martial discipline," is completely
innocent, a "young Adam before the Fall" who cannot even com–
prehend the thought of salvation or a savior nor that of law or sin.
In
his
sacrificial death he is transformed into a Christ figure. His
hanging, like the crucifixion, is attended by cosmic responses: there
is the strange sound of a sudden and distant tropical rain, which
"seemed to indicate some capricious revulsion of thought or feeling
such as mobs ashore are liable to, in the present instance possibly
a sullen revocation on the men's part in their involuntary echoing of
Billy's benediction," and later the sea fowl swoop down toward the
ship, .
in_
strange agitation. The sailors look with reverence on the
