Jesus' Son (1992) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Gene: Add a description of this character.
• Wayne
• Richard
• Tom
• Michelle
• Terrence Weber: A man who comes into the hospital with a knife stuck in his eye.
• Mclnnes

Quotes edit see section history

• “By his manner he seemed to endorse the idea of not doing anything about this. I was relieved and tearful. I’d thought something was required of me, but I hadn’t wanted to find out what it was.”

• “I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”

• “My secret was that in this short while I had gone from being the president of this tragedy to being a faceless onlooker at a gory wreck.”

• “Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”

• “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

• “We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that.”

• “I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn't going anywhere. The people all seemed to have escaped from someplace--I saw plastic hospital name bracelets on several wrists. They were trying to pay for their drinks with counterfeit money they'd made themselves, in Xerox machines.”

• “Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault.”

• “We lived in a tiny, dirty apartment. When I realized how long I'd been out and how close I'd come to leaving it forever, our little home seemed to glitter like cheap jewelry. I was overjoyed not to be dead. Generally the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke. There was no touching the hem of mystery, no little occasion when any of us thought--well, speaking for myself only, I suppose--that our lungs were filled with light or anything like that. I had a moment's glory that night, though. I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn't tolerate any other place.”

• “The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings.”

• “I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.”

• “We found my sixty-dollar Chevrolet, the finest and best thing I ever bought, considering the price, in the streets near my apartment. I liked that car. It was the kind of thing you could bang into a phone pole with and nothing would happen at all.”

• “'Nurse,' I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. 'You have a lovely pitching arm.' You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom.”

• “His eyeballs look like he bought them in joke shop.”

• “But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me that way she had at first, before she really knew me.”

• “I know there are people who believe that wherever you look, all you see is yourself.”

• “The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them.”

• “It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.”

• “There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place.”

• “I was in Pig Alley. It was directly on the harbor, built out over the waters on a rickety pier, with floors of carpeted plywood and a Formica bar. The cigarette smoke looked unearthly. The sun lowered itself through the roof of clouds, ignited the sea, and filled the big picture window with molten light, so that we did our dealing and dreaming in a brilliant fog. People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar. And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me?”

• “Well, I'm older than you are. You can take a couple more rides on this wheel and still get out with all your arms and legs stuck on right. Not me.”

• “Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”

  Billy

• “No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.”

• “I felt about the circular hallway of Beverly Home as about the place where, between our lives on this earth, we go back to mingle with other souls waiting to be born.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Seattle
• Iowa
• Chicago
• Missouri
• Phoenix
• Kansas City

Organizations edit see section history

• Narcotics Anonymous (NA): Add a description of this organization.
• AA

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• addiction: Describe this theme.
• interpersonal violence

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Denis Johnson (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Short Stories › Anthologies
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary