REINTERPRETATION OF RELIGION IN THE NOVEL “CITY OF GOD” BY E. L. DOCTOROW
Journal Title: Scientific journal «International Journal of Philology» - Year 2017, Vol 1, Issue 276
Abstract
In this study, we examine E. L. Doctorow’s novel “City of God” (2000) closely, in part because E. L. Doctorow has surpassed all other living writers in his XIX and XX centuries’ American life vivid depictions. The aim of this work is to determine religious issues in the novel. The novel depicts the last decades of the cultural and intellectual life of the twentieth century. According to E.L. Doctorow, if religion is disappears, science will replace it. However, science, becoming a new religion, reveals the foundations of culture to discount the importance of modernist theories regarding ontogenetic and phylogenetic revolution. Critics call “City of God” E.L. Doctorow’s novel “puzzle”, non-linear, dotted and fragmentary, philosophical historical metafiction written in style of jazz improvisation. Pemberton is the typical protagonist that presents many modernist main characters who got Gnostic revelation. He thinks that the theft of large cross from the church and its appearance on the roof of a Jewish synagogue is sign of heaven. Pemberton interprets it as the necessity for reconciliation between the old and new, Jewish and Christian. This conviction leads him to return to the old faith and marriage to Sarah. E.L. Doctorow renews the motive of balance between opposites referring to the need for harmony between science and religion. At first pages of the novel unknown narrator describes creation of the universe and raises a number of questions which cannot be answered without a transcendent revelation: in his view, the idea of God is balanced by its existential reflection in the infinity of the universe. The narrator is unable to resolve the existential aspirations of people. At the very beginning reader understand that religion is the main theme of the novel. This study allows determining in the novel by E.L. Doctorow “City of God” such main issues as: problems of balance between modern science and traditional religion; the nature of faith. The Bible is the prototype of the novel in structure, because an amalgam of literary genres conforms to the same topic. The main idea of the novel is the endless person’s aspiration for spiritual purification. The fact that people like Pemberton and Sarah need to believe in God as the Creator, according to modern physics and cosmology proves that there is a “an evolved moral sense” and metaphysical strivings.
Authors and Affiliations
A Kravchenko, M Lovitsek
Keywords
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