Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the "very Jewish Jesus" of Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son

This essay argues that in The Gospel According to the Son, Norman Mailer endeavors to harness the gospel form and leverage the spiritual and historical ambiguities of the figure of Jesus in an effort to rescue the central symbolic concern of the novel—the problem of evil—from what Mailer sees as its current ideological debasement at the hands of devotees of both the neo-conservative and liberal political persuasions. Organized as a theodicy, Mailer's gospel features a cosmology that is Manichean and existential, positing a God who is not all-powerful and who is engaged in a never-ending struggle with the Devil over the moral fate of the universe. By dramatizing a shared existential situation and common enemy, Mailer is seeking symbolic terms for a rapprochement, not just between Man and God, but also between Christian and Jew and indeed, on a less spiritual plain, between the political left and right in America.