Weekly Wire
The Boston Phoenix The Curse of O'Nan
In his new novel, Stewart O'Nan explores the landscape of affliction.
By Chris Wright
MAY 10, 1999:
A PRAYER FOR THE DYING, by Stewart O'Nan. Holt, 208 pages, $22.
A novelist friend of mine, upon hearing that I was about to interview Stewart O'Nan, asked me to relay a question. "Why," she wanted to know, "do you write so many damn books?" And it's a good question. Since 1993, the 38-year-old Pittsburgh native (and Connecticut resident) has published four novels and one book of short stories, all to high critical acclaim. Indeed, during the past six years, O'Nan has shown himself to be not only prolific, but also one of America's most thoughtful and versatile young novelists -- a fact rubber-stamped a few years back when the literary magazine Granta placed him on its much-heralded Top 40 list of young American writers.
A large part of O'Nan's appeal is in the mind-boggling variety of his subject matter. From plumbing the tormented psyche of a Vietnam vet to spinning the self-serving memoirs of a female death-row inmate, O'Nan has proved himself willing to explore a wide range of psychological, historical, and geographical landscapes. In his latest novel, A Prayer for the Dying, O'Nan takes us to late-19th-century rural Wisconsin, where a town named Friendship finds itself on the wrong end of an Old Testament double whammy: pestilence and fire.
Stopping by the Phoenix offices for an interview en route to the Red Sox season opener, O'Nan agrees that his literature has a tendency to roam. "I have a short attention span," he deadpans. "I'm interested in all these different people. It's like when you see someone on the street, you want to follow them home."
Not that you'd really want to follow any of O'Nan's characters anywhere. "Typically," he says, "I write about people who are completely fucked up." Then again, we'd all be a little fraught if we were in a Stewart O'Nan novel. Regardless of the disparity of their circumstances, all of O'Nan's characters are pretty much in the same spot: wedged between hope and despair, having the life squeezed out of them.
Jacob Hansen, the unlucky protagonist of A Prayer for the Dying, is certainly no exception. Described by O'Nan as a "Christian existential horror book," A Prayer for the Dying is O'Nan's grimmest to date, putting Jacob through a series of trials that make the suffering visited upon Job seem like a tough episode of America's Funniest Home Videos.
As O'Nan puts it, "It's not the feel-good comedy of the year."
The story opens blithely enough:
High summer and Friendship's quiet. The men tend the shimmering fields. Children tramp the woods, wade the creeks, sound the cool ponds. . . . Cows twitch and flick.
You like it like this, the bright, languid days.
The "you" refers to Jacob (the book is narrated in the second person). An earnest, God-fearing Civil War veteran, Jacob is an almost absurdly good man. He not only serves as Friendship's constable, preacher, and undertaker, but also manages to be an attentive husband and doting father in his spare time. Of course, ministering to a community's spiritual, judicial, and corporal needs is challenging enough at the best of times. In the worst of times, it's downright ravaging. As Jacob is about to discover.
A stranger's corpse is discovered in the woods behind a local farm, "belly-down beside the smudge of a dead campfire." Having just tended to that emergency, Jacob finds another body, this time a woman, also lying face down. She's not dead, but mad, raving about having seen Jesus. Both people, it turns out, are afflicted with diphtheria, an infectious and fatal disease. These first two cases establish a terrible momentum that continues throughout the book. Before long, the good people of Friendship are dropping like flies -- and the flies are having a field day.
O'Nan says A Prayer for the Dying was inspired by Michael Lesy's historical montage Wisconsin Death Trip, which documented a real-life diphtheria epidemic that swept through the region in the 1890s. "I ran into the book in a library somewhere," he says. "I read it and had this weird, queasy reaction to it, that gothic feeling of being terrified of and attracted by something at the same time. I thought, if I could get that feeling into a book, into a piece of prose, that would be amazing."
He got it, all right. Though A Prayer for the Dying invites obvious comparisons to Albert Camus's The Plague, O'Nan insists his book owes a far heavier debt to George Romero's schlock-horror film The Night of the Living Dead, which, he says, "is about isolation, about people boarded up in houses, about crazy people wandering a landscape that is empty and beautiful."
The book certainly contains more than its fair share of gothic horror. O'Nan seems to delight in offering up descriptions of Jacob's gory undertaking duties (a creepiness heightened by the fact that he insists on chatting with the corpses while he nicks their ankles and drains them of their blood). He describes the effects of diphtheria with a poet's scrutiny ("eyes sunken in violet pits, cheeks creased and hollow"). And, as the disease spreads, a horrible madness grips the town. People are shot, poisoned, burned alive. There are intimations of necrophilia and cannibalism.
The really disturbing aspect of the book, though, is in watching Jacob's saintly commitment to his duties contort into a kind of mania. "You'll do what's best for everyone," he says in the early days of the outbreak. But, as Jacob discovers, doing the right thing is by no means a clear-cut proposition. (In an awful ironic twist, Jacob's compulsive desire to observe proper care for the dead is instrumental in spreading the disease.)
Inevitably, Jacob goes off his rocker. When his own family appears to have been stricken, he even loses his grasp on his faith. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that Jacob's motives are more personal than spiritual anyway, and we start to question his faith. This is part of O'Nan's brilliance: he forces us into the same moral snarls as his characters, and then leaves us to work our own way out of them.
Moral complexity notwithstanding, O'Nan also has an ability to create situations of near-farcical dreadfulness. He pushes the macabre to the edge of comedy, and then holds it there. What next? you think, and before you're finished formulating the question another very bad thing is batting you over the head. And that's what makes for a good horror novel, says O'Nan.
As in the best horror novels, though, much of what's really frightening about A Prayer for the Dying lies in what's left unsaid. One of the creepiest moments of the book, for instance, occurs during a scene of supposed domestic bliss:
After dinner Marta plays the melodeon and the two of you sing. She falls off the stool but you prop her up, set her foot on the pedals, her fingers on the keys, help her find middle C. Jesus Our Redeemer. He Will Overcome. Amelia plays on the floor with her cornhusk doll.
Marta and Amelia are Jacob's wife and child, and we're pretty sure by this point that they're dead. But the confirmation is horrible for its insidiousness, the realization made all the more eerie because it creeps up on us, reveals itself to us in this awful vision of madness.
The book is equally murky in the many philosophical questions it raises. Faith and responsibility, good and evil, despair and salvation -- it's not what's revealed about these things that makes their presence so powerful, it's what we're left to figure out for ourselves. At one point during one of his many self-inquisitions, Jacob asks:
Who are you angry with?
Not God.
No? Who else is there? Is this the devil's work?
It must be, you think, but uncertainly. It must be, but you're confused.
In this instance, as with the rest of the book, the second-person narrative adds an air of immediacy and universality, and takes Jacob's search for answers to the reader. After all, you are confused, too. There's a gauze of indeterminacy hanging over the entire novel, and for this reason it's a challenging, even difficult book to read.
"Good," says O'Nan. Though he'd like us to be entertained by his books, he also wants us to face up to questions we might otherwise "shrug off." In this, he likens A Prayer for the Dying to an "abusive but loving parent: half the time it's cooing to you and patting you on the back, and the other half it's beating the crap out of you."
In meting out misery and pain to his beleaguered characters, though, O'Nan more often takes on the role of vengeful deity than abusive parent.
"Oh yeah," O'Nan says, "there is that placement of the novelist as God. You worry about that, but you try to be as generous as possible. If you're treating your characters as little game pieces, you would never have anything of consequence. Emotionally, you have to be very close to your characters. You have to love them."
But if O'Nan loves the characters in A Prayer for the Dying, he's got a funny way of showing it. At one point, as Jacob crafts a casket for his daughter, he asks, "Will there be anything harder than this?" And there most certainly will be. Toward the end of the book, as the diphtheria epidemic spreads like wildfire, O'Nan introduces a real wildfire into the proceedings. Having gone from bad to worse, the lot of Friendship's inhabitants goes to absolute worst, and the dutiful Jacob is reduced to the role of helpless onlooker.
Ultimately, O'Nan says, the question underlying all of his work is "When do you give up?" Which, he concedes, "is a horrible question to ask, but it's a question that a lot of people have to face." Then, echoing Hamlet's famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, "That's the question."
Just don't expect O'Nan to supply the answer.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteStewart O’Nan’s interview concerning his novel A Prayer for the Dying really gives the reader insight into what compelled O’Nan to write such a disturbing piece of the literature. Mostly, he was inspired by the book, Wisconsin Death Trip, which was the non-fiction piece documenting a real plague that spread during the late nineteenth century. He takes such instances throughout the novel, like the one where Jacob dances with his dead wife Marta, to show how Jacob is slowly retreating into the madness that comes with diphtheria without actually having the disease. He is in great denial and refuses to let go of the life he had before the diphtheria outbreak. Another moment in the novel that comes across as being hard to read is when Sarah Ramsey submits to the insanity that has plagued her after the death of all four of her children. She is then locked in a room by Doc and left to die on her own. Doc and Jacob say it is for the sake of everyone else, but it is mostly for themselves: “At least this will keep the other people safe.” I find this to be reflective of many situations in horror movies, that everyone seems to be keen on helping each other in the beginning, but towards the end it becomes evident they are only looking out for themselves. It is somewhat hard to understand why O’Nan would write something so disturbing, but this interview gives some insight. He wrote to show the philosophical undertone of questioning religion during a time when everything seems to be going wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this interview, I felt that I was able to examine the book from the perspective of an onlooker. Reading a second-person novel places the reader so firmly in the story that it is difficult to look at the big picture. The author of this interview describes Jacob’s actions with a kind of revulsion. For example, when describing Jacob’s “gory undertaking duties,” the author of this interview notes the “creepiness heightened by the fact that he insists on chatting with the corpses while he nicks their ankles and drains them of their blood.” Strangely, I never viewed Jacob in this way, as a character who, as Stewart O’Nan says, is “fucked up.” When I read A Prayer for the Dying through Jacob’s eyes, I see him as a good and moral man who has been heaped with misfortune. His descent into madness seems almost rational (much like Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar). Even when he burns down houses and locks Sarah Ramsay in her house, he seems to always have a reason for it: it’s just necessary. But at times, Jacob questions himself. Therefore, the reader questions him or herself, and O’Nan makes us feel afraid, not of the plague, but of ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the interview...It shows that he’s really proud of this piece. He's describing what he thinks of it in depth and what should be noted about the book when reading. He is very good with words because he makes a lot of very interesting examples in the interview. This ties into the book in that the author is very descriptive. He is extremely articulate and focuses on detail. He uses very abstract means of expressing himself and that also ties into the book. The interview is very helpful when you are trying to analyze the author.
ReplyDeleteThe book has a lot of gory detail in it that makes the book more appealing and scary. The second person makes the author view the book form an internal perspective at times. The really gross imagery in the book concerning the reoccurring theme of death makes the book practically unbearable. The graphic nature of the book combined with the second person makes the reader cringe and twitch at the dark events that occur in the book. For example, the killing of the cow in the book was extremely detailed and makes the reader emote at the very image and idea. It is extremely graphic and the detail sparks emotion.
In general it seems like O’ Nan himself is a pretty messed up person. I think this relays into his characters as they too as he says are messed up. However his comment about beings stuck in between hope and despair seems to be literal with Jacob in relation to his jobs. He is a literal symbol of hope in the form of a preacher, however he is a symbol of despair in the form of an undertaker. In addition it seems that throughout the book his work as an undertaker seems to overtake his work as a preacher.
ReplyDeleteIn the interview, Jacob’s sense of duty is also noted, and the fact that he feels he is responsible for the people, this makes it easy to think that a message being conveyed is possibly the fact that putting to much responsibility on one person can cause that person’s world to crash around him, in the book that world being his wife and child.
The ironic situation that Jacob is in also needs to be brought to light here as, though he is trying to protect these people, he is causing the deaths of many and at the same time going mad. To think that the most highly regarded people may be the most unstable is very unsettling, and makes one question who is to be trusted.
-Jonathan Madison
The interview severely downplays the eerie environment set by Prayer for the Dying. As I read this novel, I feel myself being pulled down into insanity along with Jacob. The use of the second person is impeccably horrifying. The reader feels Jacob’s desperation and despair, especially after the disease takes his family.
ReplyDeleteDespite his sense of duty, I think at times Jacob wants to escape the burden of his duty and the dark cloud of disease, especially in his interaction with the hermit in chapter 5; “You would rather be the Hermit than Chase, retire rather than having your faith tested”. But by persisting in his duty to the people, as their sheriff, undertaker, preacher, he burdens himself with more guilt, which weighs on his conscience. In a desperate search for solace, Jacob taxidermies his wife and daughter when they are taken by the disease, possibly out of a subconscious desire for normalcy and routine in his life, to keep something comforting to come home to after being surrounded by death all day.
The book is not creepy, the book is terrifying. It pulls the reader in and drags them into simulated madness.
Towards the end of his interview Stewart O’Nan talks about how Jacob has become a helpless onlooker. Everything that he used to be able to do becomes useless because he realizes that he is the one spreading the disease. Now, in order to do what is best for the town he has to sacrifice himself. He can no longer continue doing what he is doing with being an undertaker, a sheriff and a priest. Now doing what is right becomes a lot harder because he has to give up something of his instead of just doing his job. After his wife and daughter die, he has nothing left but his work, and even that becomes negative because it is not becoming the good deed that it used to be. Jacob wants desperately to help his town but his decision becomes between the town and himself.
ReplyDeleteWhen Marta dies, Jacob is not able to let go. He cannot accept the fact that he has lost the woman that he loves. He has already lost his daughter and then losing his wife leaves him practically nothing to live for. Seeing Jacob’s emotional response is very touching because the book describes Jacob doing things with his wife even though she is dead. He dances with her and has her play the piano and this image is very powerful because it gives insight to how Jacob is feeling. I can just imagine someone denying a death so strongly that they continue to move the body like it is alive. It shows how much he cared about her and how hard it is for him to accept the loss.
The irony in Jacob being the spreader of the disease is also very important because it goes back to the decision that Jacob has to make. He has devoted his life to doing good things for his town and then the good thing to do changes drastically.
When Amelia dies, Jacob and Marta feel as it was a “shared failure” (91). Jacob is beginning to realize that he is responsible for all of the deaths and Marta feels as if she didn’t care for her daughter well enough. Both of these characters are beginning to see the disease and the epidemic in a new way because it has hit someone close to their heart.
Jerica Torres 11/16/09
ReplyDeleteIn O’Nans interview he brings up key points to his work, like Prayer for the Dying. Throughout the novel Prayer for the Dying the main character, Jacob, goes through this denial with Diphtheria. O’Nan explains how ironic it is that Jacob has this desire to care for the dead is instrumental in spreading the disease meaning he’s the carrier of this disease but he’s helping others actually giving them the disease.When Jacob danced with his dead wife or made her play the melodian it starts to go into his madness and his questioning for God and faith but even though he questioned his faith he still prayed. I liked how it was put in second person because it put you in the story and you felt what Jacob felt when he started to talk to himself. O'Nan just brings this creepiness that's really disturbing.
A Prayer For the Dying by Stewart O’Nan is a truly horrifying novel. Not only is Jacob grappling with the quarantine of his small town of Friendship, he, as the constable, undertaker and preacher, embodies all the jobs necessary in this horrible time. He walks the thin line between despair and madness, and is sent spiraling towards the latter when his wife and child die. His mind scraping for some normalcy in his world that is breaking apart, he refuses to believe that they are dead, instead living with them as if they still lived. Which inevitably leads to necrophilia.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, his life as undertaker, constable and preacher is falling apart. His inability to help the people of Friendship tears at him. He has to do things that seem wrong, and yet are the only things that can be done. For example, he and Doc end up locking Sarah Ramsay in her house, as she is infected with diphtheria, and insane with grief over her sons’ death. Fenton, who works at the general store, asks him a bout it. “’Heard about Sarah Ramsay.’
‘Sad thing, ‘ you say, and sigh. ‘Wasn’t much else we could do.’
‘Don’t think I could do something like that.’
‘You do when you have to,’ you say.
‘You’d have to be an awful hard man, I expect.’”
This shows how Jacob is having trouble figuring out what is right and what is wrong. He is struggling with morality, and on top of everything, this is just one more trouble that he doesn’t meed. The only thing he feels like he can do well anymore is to take care of the bodies after their death, and in doing so he unknowingly perpetuates the disease.
Alicia Green
ReplyDeleteThis book is interesting, O’Nan wrote this book with both excitement, fear, and over the top actions from the character Jacob. The Novel, A prayer for the dying tells about a disease that gas spread out into the town Friendship. What grabbed me, as a reader was the second person story? It was that it makes the reader grasp the actions and really engages you into the characters thoughts and feelings. The book that and the Article really help me to understand the concept of the story. In the book it kinds of gets confusing because he can go in to one story and than go to a flashback on a very deep description. In the article it basically sums up the theme and the action. The article talks about Jacob, He not only serves as Friendship's constable, preacher, and undertaker, but also manages to be an attentive husband and doting father in his spare time…In an awful ironic twist, Jacob's compulsive desire to observe proper care for the dead is instrumental in spreading the disease. O’Nan gives a new attraction the novel as it unravels to the truth. He also talks about the seriousness of the disease on the novel in the article as he states, these first two cases establish a terrible momentum that continues throughout the book. Before long, the good people of Friendship are dropping like flies -- and the flies are having a field day.
Amane Amireh
ReplyDeleteI think that Jacob is in deep denial of the fact that the diphtheria is going to or might kill every one in the town. I think he works and continues to work to keep his mind off the fact that he is the carrier of diphtheria. In the interview with O’Nan a lot of interesting point were made that help me better understand the novel. During the interview O’Nan mentions that he was inspired to write this novel after he read Wisconsin Death Trip, he said it kind of made him feel queasy. Then he goes on to say he felt “that gothic feeling of being terrified of and attracted by something at the same time.” This statement is evident because many people are attracted to things that gross them out or that they are afraid of. It’s like when every one knew that Texas Chain Saw Massacre was based on a true story of a man that could still be out there, and yet every one still went to go see the movie. Or like Paranormal Activity. Many people fear that ghost are real other believe that hey are real and yet people go and watch the movie. It’s like we like the feeling of being afraid of being nervous. We like thinking of what we would do in situations like that, how would we react. The irony in the novel A Prayer For The Dying really pulled me into the story. For instance, Jacob is going around as an Undertaker, a sheriff, and a preacher he goes around helping people and he comes in contact with all these people and while helping them he is killing them at the same time. Like in the book when O’Nan described the scene in which Marta and Jacob lay in the grass and Jacob thought to himself maybe while he was loving her he was killing her at the same time. He didn’t want to be alone. He locked his wife and daughter in the house the whole time to keep them safe and yet he is the one who put them in danger, who killed them.
It’s ironic because Jacob's compulsive desire to observe proper care for the dead is instrumental in spreading the disease. He also begins to loose his faith when his family is gone. Then he becomes a necrophiliac and makes love with his dead wife. He begins to become insane. Even after his wife and daughter are dead he sees them he holds them he talks to them. Through out the novel we are informed that Jacob is a preacher and he prays and he is deep into his Christian faith. But after he looses so many people and encounters all these dead people and undertakes and bloods people, burying them and some animals, he begins to blame God and questions his actions.
I believe the fact that Jacob was in the war had a big impact on how he got through the town and worked hard to “help”. Just like the war impacted how he felt about horses and moving dead bodies. In the interview it was stated that O'Nan also has an ability to create situations of near-farcical dreadfulness. The Way he handled the Cow and how it broke its own leg, how the flies ate the dog and the description of the blood on the throat and the sunken eye sockets, the blood and gory of O’Nan’s style had a twist of like Stephen Crane and Stephen King put together or bits and pieces of both. I liked the novel and I liked O’Nan’s second person story. It really brought me in and made me think.
A Prayer for the Dying might be my favorite book we’ve read as a class this year so far. It has an initially spooky setting that develops into a desolate hopeless wasteland. Jacob, the protagonist, seems more central than even he knows. He has sworn to uphold the law, protect the people, care for the dead, and stand by God, but is the very cause of the town’s death. He, more than anyone else, spreads the diphtheria throughout Friendship. As the situation worsens and his hope erodes, Jacob is constantly faced with the question, “when must I give up?” He loses his family and the majority of the town as he searches for a cause, cure, and care for the dead that continue to surround him. In a certain dark moment, Jacob sees
ReplyDeleteLittle hope to have any more faith, and finds himself crying out against God. Nevertheless, his problems have not gone away (and apparently, a fire comes next in the story). A Prayer for the Dying seems not to ask “why” so much as it states the facts. It is a terrible situation that one cannot walk away from, but cannot see the solution. Like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, Jacob becomes lonely and without promise; the only thing he can be sure of is that if he does give up, there can be no hope, whereas if he keeps fighting, perhaps his help has simply not been found yet. Nevertheless, at the end of each day, he can’t help but ask, “What’s the point?” It’s a gross near-zombieland, made even spookier by O’Nan’s second-person voice.
A Prayer for the dying is a creepy novel that makes the reader feel as if they are the main character. Jacob is the undertaker of friendship, who feels that it is his duty to take all the responsibility for the town. Jacob gives all his faith and God and hopes that things will eventually get better. When the disease gets worse it spreads all through the town and there is more pressure on Jacob. People are dropping like flies, and there are more bad things happening. There is a fire that is spreading and people that are committing suicide because they don’t want to suffer the pain that this disease is giving them. Jacob constantly questions his thought in faith throughout the book.
ReplyDeleteHe thinks why would God do these things to innocent people? When Jacob’s family dies that is when he looses all his faith. The weird thing about this is that he is sleeping with his dead wife Marta and having her play the piano, while his daughter Amelia is also dead and he has his daughter playing with doll on the floor. I found this part very confusing because it made me think if his family was really dead. Jacob did not want people to come into the town because he did not want the disease to spread anymore. So he blocked off the town with signs warning people of the disease. People were very angry with him, there were people who had family members coming into town and others who had to cross through the town to get were they had to go.
Jacob was confused of why people were so upset with him and he was just trying to do what was right for them. The people in the town thought otherwise, they thought that he was doing this to hurt them. So many people turned on him that when he went to church to deliver his sermon the only person there to hear him was Chase. Chase was the leader of the town. Jacob wanting to help people from getting this disease, but what he didn’t know was that he was the one who was giving the disease to all these people and he was immune to it. Jacob was spreading all of these germs and not doing what Doc was telling him to do.
Jacob was draining these dead people’s blood and touching them. His actions were harming others, and he knew nothing about it. He forced people to stay in their homes, and that also made people even more anger. A prayer for the dying is a novel that is interesting and it always something horrible that is happening in the town. This novel is hard to put down because you want to know what will happen next. Jacob feels that his is being a good man but he is really killing half of the people in the town slowly.
sha81_gurl=Shana
ReplyDeleteI like Stewart O'Nan and his thoughts. His take on life and his own writing was interesting. He said, "i writes about people that are fucked up". And he does Jacob is a messed up person. He finds pleasure in his job undertaking, and actually talks to the corpses. And he also has issue with being alone and keeps his family's dead corpses in the house and moves them to create "the norm". That is one of the more creep things i've ever read in a book. Even though the book is creepy, i couldn't stop reading it, i didn't want to put it down.
ReplyDeletei think Stewart O'nan is a wondeful writer his personality just accents his style as a writer.
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ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading A Prayer for the Dying. This interview really enhanced my view on the story of Jacob and also my view on O'nan's writing. It definitley was an interesting and different book. When you read it, the combination of the story and being written in second person gives the novel an eerie feeling but it keeps the reader interested. I think a lot of people like writing and reading about weird people because it makes themselves feel more normal.
ReplyDeleteI respect O'Nan's views and how he chooses to write, it obviously is a succesful method. I don't necessarily think he is a creepy guy, I think he is very imaginative and knows what people will like to read about. He has an amazing way of engaging the reader and making them become engrossed in Jacob's story and his struggles with normality in a world of chaos.
RE: A Prayer for the Dying.
ReplyDeleteThe intruiging thing about A Prayer for the Dying is that it is written in the second person. Whiles we have already established this, as I continue to read this book, I really begin to understand how a writer can effectively get into the reader's mind. Because of the fact that O'Nan writes in second person, the reader is really kind of trapped inside of the writing; you really become Jacob living inside of Friendship, experiencing the tragedy that comes with the outbreak of a pandemic disease such as diptheria. The reader really knows what it feels like to be lonely and want your family back when Jacob keeps his wife and child inside of his house, which is indeed very insane. Nonetheless, O'Nan's writing is not only effective in the sense where he gets in the readers head but it's also very creative and beautifully thought out writing.
RE: Stewart O'Nan interveiw
As a writer I understand that people may not necessarily be able to know where my story ideas come from. It's hard to understand the background of every single short story and novel that we read. I feel as if this interveiw was helpful in the sense that you can understand the story more because of its origins. Now, before reading this interview I never heard of the Wisconsin Death Trip and now I want to do some research about it and really try to figure out what the author was trying to do with this story. I want to know what the purpose is behind A Prayer for the Dying and really analyze the thought and psychological factors that contributed to the creation of this book.
I think Stewart O'nan is a wonderful writer whose personality just accents his style as a writer. I find it interesting how O’nan describes his interest in characters by saying “It's like when you see someone on the street, you want to follow them home." Cause everyday I observe people and I constantly wonder about why people look and act certain ways. Also I believe that’s the main reason why I was so drawn to the book because I kept wondering what caused the disease, how was it going to get fixed, and how did the fire tie in with the epidemic. Until the ending revealed that everything was connected to this one, in O’nan’s words “completely fucked up character” Jacob. Jacob is the main character of the novel.
ReplyDeleteThe novel address issues such as how people seek perfection, grieving, being dedicated to your religious faith and many others. I think the major theme of the novel was faith not only in God but also in the quarantine and it’s ability to end the spread of the disease, in his few supporters like Doc, his family and Bart and his decisions as a whole. His faith was his downfall. Though he acted out of faith and did what he thought was proper he was still the cause of all the turmoil around him. Though the novel is full of important lessons and powerful imagery I believe the article emphasizes the most important parts of the novel.
My great-grandfather lost four children to this actual epidemic in Wisconsin at that time. I am going to read this book!
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