© 1987 Rich Gray and Don King

A version of this essay first appeared in The Christian Scholars' Review 16 (January 1987): 109-121.

The Christian Hero and the Realistic Novel

Henry James said in his manifesto on the realistic novel, "The Art of Fiction": "We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnee: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it....The province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision" (227-29). The thesis of James' essay is that art, in particular the realistic novel, takes as its subject matter all of life.* The author may choose any area of life to write about; consequently, no area is forbidden him on artistic grounds. If what James says is true, then Christian belief can be the focus of a realistic novel. Accordingly, this essay will examine one central question: Can an exemplary Christian be the hero of a realistic novel?

Before we can answer this question, however, we must address an even pricklier one: what do we mean by an exemplary Christian? In answering this question, we realize the possibility that we may "box ourselves in," since our definition may be too narrow for some and too broad for others. We accept this dilemma as a given liability of our discussion, but we hope that our definition will be both unique and inclusive. We begin then by turning to Bertrand Russell, whose clear stand as a non-Christian qualifies him as a disinterested party. In his seminal essay "Why I Am Not A Christian" (1927), Russell asks the question: "What is a Christian?" His answer provides a basis for our present discussion:

Although Russell's definition is clearly secular (since he allows that a Christian does not necessarily have to accept the divinity of Christ), at least he acknowledges that belief in Christ is central to the discussion. A second definition takes us to the other end of the theological spectrum. The Westminster Confession of Faith in the section "Of Saving Grace" says that "a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the word, for the authority of God himself is speaking therein; and acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life and that which is to come" (96). From this passage we understand that a Christian is one who knows of God through the Scriptures, who believes in God's authority, and who obeys God's teachings. Knowledge, faith, and righteousness help to define the Christian. In addition, we read that to be a Christian means "accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life" (96).

Like Russell, The Westminster Confession assigns faith in Christ as central to the definition of a Christian. Furthermore, the Confession qualifies the idea of faith in Christ in a particular way that is germane to our discussion: "This faith [in Christ] is different in degrees, weak or strong; may be often and many ways assailed and weakened, but gets the victory; growing up in many to the attainment of a full assurance through Christ, who is both the author and finisher of our faith" (96). For the purposes of this paper, we accept the definition of a Christian as presented by the Confession, especially its qualification that a Christian "may be often and many ways assailed and weakened, but [he] gets the victory." That is, while we are aware that many people might share Russell's more secular definition of a Christian, we are concerned in this paper with the appearance in realistic fiction of the Christian character who is earnestly seeking to live and act as a faithful, sincere follower of Jesus Christ. At the same time, he is not perfect; because he is "assailed and weakened," he does sin. Indeed, because he is a sinner and knows it, he can become appealing to the reader. Readers, themselves sinners, feel more comfortable reading about sinners than saints. Still, what distinguishes the exemplary Christian character in realistic fiction is his earnest desire to live out faithfully the Christian life, in spite of his knowledge of and capacity to sin. To summarize, an exemplary Christian character is a paradox; he is an ordinary person, but he exhibits greater than ordinary virtues.

Do such characters exist in realistic fiction? Even a cursory glance leaves little doubt that the novel has often dealt with Christian characters. In Pride and Prejudice the clergyman, Collins, is replusively obsequious, and in Barchester Towers, another clergyman, the "bestial" Mr. Slope, is a central part of the story. In Light in August, Hightower, a preacher, has withdrawn from social problems, and in Moby Dick Father Mapple urges his congregation "to preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood." Because we could go on and on, we present a summary below, suggesting a number of different kinds of Christians appearing in realistic fiction.

What is clear in all these examples is that while Christians frequently appear in the novel, they are usually either unattractive or insignificant. Seldom is an exemplary Christian the protagonist of a novel. Conversely, the novel abounds in lechers, liars, and egotists; in addition, its pages are filled with confused, detached, introspective anti-heroes. Unquestionably, evil is a more interesting subject than goodness, and when ending in punishment or tragedy, evil can be as instructive as goodness. However, if James is correct, may not anything, even goodness, even Christian goodness, be the subject matter of a novel? Where, then, is an exemplary Christian the hero of a realistic novel?

In order to answer this question, we have identified three specific kinds of exemplary Christians who appear in realistic fiction. The first is the repentant one; that is, this character typically wrestles with his faith throughout the story and at the end arrives at a point of commitment, either of conversion to Christianity or of rededication to a devout Christian faith. For example, in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale can be considered a Christian hero. However, Dimmesdale's faith triumphs at the end of the story not throughout it, and the novel dwells much more on his, Hester's, Chillingworth's, and the townspeople's sin than on Dimmesdale's ultimate triumph over sin. To illustrate, during the climatic forest scene, Dimmesdale tells Hester that his godly life as minister does not make him admirable: "Of penance, I have had enough! Of penitence, there has been none!" (183). Here Dimmesdale is at the nadir of defeat; not until he finally mounts the scaffold and confesses to the sin of fornication with Hester is he spiritually triumphant: "People of New England...ye, that have deemed me holy!--behold me here, the one sinner of the world!" (237).

It could be argued that Dimmesdale's feelings of guilt throughout the novel qualify him as an admirable Christian hero. Certainly Hester thinks this is so. But that Dimmesdale is hypocritical, defeated, and utterly lost morally during these tension filled middle chapters is what Hawthorne is trying to show us. That Dimmesdale appears to be a Christian hero but can never be one until he bares his own scarlet letter to the public is the point. The focus of the novel, then, is not on Dimmesdale as a Christian hero but on whether or not he will become one. The openness of this issue, the possibility that Dimmesdale may fail to confess, is what gives him such great psychological interest. And for all the success he had in depicting the ultimate maturation of the Christian hero, Hawthorne was not interested in depicting the day to day experience of the Christian hero who has already matured. In this regard, we note that Dimmesdale's death from unknown causes immediately after his confession comes quite naturally following the narrative of Dimmesdale's tortuous struggle to confess. Any epilogue about his life after the confession would be unthinkably anti-climatic, because he is an emergent hero, not a continuous one.

A striking parallel to The Scarlet Letter is Andre Gide's The Pastoral Symphony. In spite of Gide's ambivalence toward Christianity, this novella about an unnamed pastor's lapse into the sin of lust is profoundly Christian. This successful pastor becomes infatuated with Gertrude, the blind orphan that he and his wife have taken into their home. When Gertrude finally realizes that the pastor's compassion for her has degenerated into an adulterous lust, she tries to drown herself, is rescued, but remains seriously ill with fever. In his journal the pastor writes: "Pity, Lord, Pity! I renounce loving her, but do Thou not let her die" (396). Gertrude does die, and this tragedy helps to complete the pastor's repentance. The novel closes with him reconciled to his wife and to God: "I knelt down beside Amilie and asked her to pray for me, as I was in need of help. She simply repeated 'Our Father...' but between each sentence she left long pauses which we filled with our supplication" (400).

This conversion/rededication motif also appears in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. At the beginning the novel's staunchest Christians are Lady Marchmain and her older son, Bridey. Unfortunately, their faith does not impress Sebastian, Julia, and especially their friend, Charles Ryder, the story's narrator. From the first pages of Brideshead Revisited, Ryder views the Marchmain's Catholicism with skepticism; to him Catholicism thwarts the family from leading free, unrestrained lives. But since Ryder himself has greater and greater difficulty fulfilling his desires for romantic love, first with his wife and then with Julia, his resistance to God gradually breaks down. Cordelia in particular impresses Ryder with her articulateness, compassion, and contentment. Eventually, Ryder's climax of faith occurs at Lord Marchmain's deathbed conversion. For weeks Ryder had strenuously resisted the family's attempt to get the old sinner to repent, since he admires Lord Marchmain's epicurean lifestyle. But when Father McKay offers absolution to the dying man if he will repent, Ryder surprisingly joins Julia and Cara (Marchmain's mistress) in praying for the dying man: "Then I knelt, too, and prayed: 'O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin'" (338). In the next scene Julia speaks for Ryder as well as herself when she confesses: "But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy" (340). Together they renounce their secular quest for sexual love and commit themselves to God. Thus, Brideshead Revisited is one of the best contemporary novels in which a Christian hero emerges at the end, but it is not a novel in which a Christian hero is present throughout the story. Because of this, Regis Martin has said that the light of the gospel "seems genuinely not to have reached into Brideshead, there to linger in quite ordinary ways amid the characters and their settings" (69). Martin here seems to support the notion that a Christian hero's goodness seldom dominates a realistic novel.

A second kind of exemplary Christian is the self-reliant one. Jane Eyre contains several characters who are Christians, but only Jane emerges as self-reliant. Along with Jane, two other characters in particular demonstrate differing degrees of Christian faith: Helen Burns and St. John Rivers. Jane's own Christian faith evolves, deepens, and matures because of her relationships with both Helen and St. John. From Helen, Jane first comes to appreciate the Biblical notions of suffering and self-denial. Helen, whose favorite book is Rasselas, lives a life of Christian stoicism; therefore, when Jane complains about her early life of abuse and deprivation, Helen gently encourages Jane to "read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts; make His word your rule, and His conduct your example....love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you" (60). Helen's ideas profoundly affect Jane; before she meets Helen, Jane is overly self-centered. After her encounter with Helen, Jane learns that life is more than concern for self. Instead, Jane realizes the necessity of enduring personal suffering, even to the point of self-sacrifice.

If Helen illustrates an attractive Christian lifestyle to Jane, St. John does not. In him Jane encounters a man who appears to be devoted solely to God's service. As a clergyman, St. John is conscientious, seeking to serve both the spiritual and physical needs of his flock. Ironically, however, Jane notices that St. John is not happy with his faith: "Zealous in his ministerial labours, blameless in his life and habits, he yet did not appear to enjoy that mental serenity, that inward content, which should be the reward of every sincere Christian and practical philanthropist" (353). His lack of joy in the Christian life is later highlighted by Jane as she hears him preach a powerful, yet disturbing, sermon:

St. John's lack of fulfillment in the Christian life partially explains Jane's refusal later to marry him and go on the mission field; how can she marry a man on a spiritual mission when that man, at his very core, is not content with the message he preaches?

While Helen and St. John are opposite sides of the same spiritual coin, Jane lives out a more practical kind of Christianity; that is, what motivates her to do right or wrong is less religious devotion than it is her own emerging sense of individualism. Perhaps the best example of this occurs when Rochester makes his desperate plea for Jane to become his mistress. Throughout his cries, Jane suffers within: "While he spoke my very conscience and reason turned against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly....Soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?" (319). At this crucial moment Jane answers herself: "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man....Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation; they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be....Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot" (319).

Jane's decision is clearly admirable. She refuses to give in to her desires. At the same time, however, her keeping of "the law given by God" and "sanctioned by man" is motivated primarily by her own gradually evolving sense of worth. What urges her most to reject Rochester is self-esteem, not spiritual obedience to God. Her internal appeal to the keeping of "laws and principles," and "foregone determinations" is valuable, praiseworthy, and inspiring; her motivation, nevertheless, is not primarily because of Christian conviction. In Jane, then, we see the interplay of a strong sense of personal worth with a kind of impersonal adherence to Christian tradition. As a result, Jane comes across as a Christian hero, but not one who is driven by personal devotion to God.

What is much rarer than the self-reliant or the repentant Christian is the third kind of exemplary Christian: the God-reliant one. This character is a stable Christian at the outset who faces a series of challenges to his faith but who humbly prevails over them. This is not to say that this character triumphs easily or that he never sins, doubts, or is perplexed. The God-reliant Christian is not a saint; he does not perform miracles; and he is not released from any of the difficulties of being a man. But he acts more like Christ than the other characters do. At times his faith exhibits itself in humility, prayer, and concern for others, and he enjoys talking about Christianity with others so as to encourage their faith. In addition, he is either the central character of the novel, or he is one who verges on being the central character because the direct or indirect influence he has upon others. Two novels which contain God-reliant heroes are Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. Specifically, Father Zossima, Alyosha, and Stephen Kumalo are legitimate Christian heroes characterized by psychological complexity, genuine, not hypocritical goodness, and consistent faith in God.

In The Diary of a Writer Dostoyevsky describes the God-reliant hero: "[He is one] who has not bowed down before material temptation; who is incessantly seeking for God's cause; who loves truth and, whenever the occasion call for it, rises to serve it forsaking his home and his family and sacrificing his life" (490). Actually Dostoyevsky had attempted a fictional portrayal of such a character in Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot. He wrote to a friend: "The main thought of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful person...There is nothing more difficult than this in the world....because this problem is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but an ideal which neither we nor civilized Europe has in the least perfected" (Miller, 74). Prince Myshkin, however, is not a successful character as Dostoyevsky later admitted.** Years later he returned to this challenge and "doubled" his effort; Father Zossima, a local spiritual elder of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Alyosha Karamazov, his spiritual disciple, are the result of Dostoyevsky's determined effort to create attractive, believable, God-reliant Christian heroes.

In Zossima, Dostoyevsky epitomizes the appealing Christian within the context of a realistic novel. Zossima is not stern, but almost always at ease. Like Christ, he attracts not the bold nor the righteous, but the humble, the downcast, and even the wicked; like Christ, he is envied and hated by many Church officials; like Christ, he is loved by a great many of the common people; like Christ, he has a number of fanatical followers;

and, finally, like Christ he is a healer.*** People are drawn to him because they recognize his goodness, truth, and compassion. As Alyosha notes, Zossima "understood that to the humble soul of the Russian peasant, worn out by grief and toil, and still more by the everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world's, it was the greatest need and comfort to find someone or something holy to fall down before and worship" (The Brother's Karamazov, 24).

Yet, far from being a flat, one-dimensional character, Zossima is given a provocative psychological complexity. This complexity is especially revealed as he recounts, on his death bed, the story of his past. We learn that he had once been a military officer of less than admirable character. He had been bold, brash, and cruel. However, after having brutally beaten his servant one day, he had a vision that recalled his dying brother's last words: "In truth, we are each responsible to all for all, it's only that men don't know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once" (277). This epiphany led Zossima to apologize publicly to his servant and to a man he had once challenged to a duel. Initially he endured personal accusations of cowardice from his fellow officers, but when they learned that he intended to resign his commission and become a monk, they kindly and happily accepted him again. The psychological struggles Zossima experienced are believable and real. Consequently, since we too have experienced such psychological tensions, we identify with him and do not reject Zossima out of hand as "too-good-to-be-true."

In addition, Zossima is genuinely good; there is no hint of hypocrisy about him. The simplicity of Zossima's faith and his open confession that "the experience of active love" is all redeeming are clear and attractive. Since he is Christ's minister on earth, it is hard to argue with his basic message: "Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain" (48). Zossima's words are not cant or religious pomposity, nor are they only a hollow credo. Zossima is indeed a God-reliant hero whose actions match his claims.

Yet along with his psychological complexity and genuine goodness, Zossima evidences consistent faith in God. His faith is not, however, hidden away, in spite of the fact that he is "set apart" from the world. Though he retreats from the world, he does not retreat from reality. In fact, he sets himself apart in order to cleanse himself and prepare himself for the task he sees as crucial: guarding God's truth and presenting it to the world when all other systems and creeds fail. The monk is to keep "the image of Christ fair and undefiled, in the purity of God's truth." And he tells the other monks: "The salvation of Russia comes from the people. And the Russian monk has always been on the side of the people. We are isolated only if the people are isolated. The people believe as we do....Take care of the peasant and guard his heart....That's your duty as monks, for the peasant has God in his heart" (293-94).

However, Dostoyevsky takes his effort to create an attractive God-reliant hero one step further with Alyosha, the stated "hero" of his story. In his preface to the novel, Dostoyevsky attempts to explain the significance of Alyosha, anticipating the probing questions his readers might ask, including: "'Why should I, the reader, waste time learning the facts of his [Alyosha's] life?'" (xvii). He goes on to admit that Alyosha is something of an eccentric, even odd, yet "it happens sometimes that such a person, I dare say, carries within himself the very heart of the whole, and the rest of the men of his epoch have for some reason been temporarily torn from it, as if by a gust of wind" (xvii, emphasis ours). Though admittedly an enigmatic explanation, it seems certain that in Alyosha and his faith Dostoyevsky is hoping to focus his reader's eyes onto the God-reliant hero.

As with Zossima, Dostoyevsky is careful to portray a believable Alyosha. He takes great care to convince us that Alyosha is not a simple-minded, sickly, pale mystic. On the contrary, he is pictured as healthy, "red-cheeked," and handsome. Like the young Zossima, Alyosha experiences psychological tensions: he is badgered by the theological sophistry of Rakitin; he is spiritually tested by the death of Zossima; and he is sexually tempted by Grushenka. Furthermore, he genuinely loves his abusive father, he encourages his frustrated brother, Dmitri, and he thoughtfully listens as his other brother, Ivan, flatly challenges Alyosha's faith through the Grand Inquisitor story. As a result of his active participation in the lives of those around him, Alyosha emerges as the central character of the novel. Indeed, because of his open-heart and earnest faith, many of the other characters in the story confess to him, propelling forward the action of the novel.

In a sense, then, Zossima and Alyosha are two sides of the God-reliant hero. If Zossima is the side who retreats from the world in order to educate and reproduce God's image within the monk, then Alyosha is the side who is sent into the world to spread God's truth and love. If it is Zossima's role to guard and protect the truth, it is Alyosha's to go out and experientially demonstrate it. Therefore, by carrying out Zossima's command to go out into the world and marry, Alyosha is like one of Christ's disciples going out into the world with the words of the Great Commission ringing in his ears. Accordingly, Zossima and Alyosha are Dostoyevsky's successfully portrayed God-reliant heroes. That he hoped for such with Zossima is clear: "[If I succeed with Zossima] I shall have done a good deed: I shall compel them to recognize that a pure, ideal Christian is not something abstract, but is graphically real, possible, obviously present, and that Christianity is the sole refuge for the Russian land from all its woes" (759-60; Dostoyevsky's emphasis).

Like Zossima and Alyosha, Stephen Kumalo of Cry, the Beloved Country is a God-reliant Christian hero. His psychological complexity is revealed primarily through his inner struggles with the sin in his family and in himself. In the opening chapters of the novel, Kumalo, an Anglican priest, receives a letter from a stranger in Johannesburg bidding him come there and attend to a sick sister. This summons arouses old fears for the welfare of his much younger sister, Gertrude; for his brother, John; and for Kumalo's only son, Absalom, all who in past years have left the security of tribal life in the country to join the society of crime and racial hatred in the big city. These three loved ones never returned to the village and no longer write letters to Kumalo and his wife. Kumalo dreads his trip there to find Gertrude, having never before left his rural tribal area. When he arrives in Johannesburg, his apprehensions are fulfilled: he is robbed; he finds that his brother is a political agitator; he discovers that Gertrude's "illness" is prostitution; and he eventually finds his son jailed for murdering a white man. While these events do not crush Kumalo, he is nevertheless burdened down by them.

Being a priest does not exempt Kumalo from lapsing into sin himself. His malice overflows against his brother John, who has left the church and whose own son was an accomplice with Absalom in the murder of the white man. But John's son escapes punishment after John hires a lawyer to counsel the boy on how to lie to the judge by denying any involvement in the crime. Following an ugly argument with John which ends when John forces Kumalo out the door, Kumalo repents of his anger:

Kumalo's lack of confidence, his humility, and his faults make him a realistic, winsome hero.

As Kumalo's weakness draws our sympathy, so his genuine goodness and trust in God draw our admiration. The character who profits most from Kumalo's goodness is his son's girlfriend, who becomes Kumalo's daughter-in-law when she marries Absalom in prison, just prior to his execution. This girl comes from a broken home in the slums; she is not sure of her age but believes she is sixteen; and she has had three lovers, all criminals. At the same time, she is carrying Absalom's child. When Kumalo offers to take her and her child into his home as his daughter and grandchild, she eagerly accepts. The prospect of leaving the cycle of illegitimacy, alcoholism, crime, and degradation in Johannesburg excites her. Kumalo is not a crusader, not an intellectual, and not a social reformer, but he commits himself to caring for others and giving them shelter, moral guidance, and empathy in the broken society of South Africa.

The crux of Kumalo's admirability as a Christian is his enduring reliance on God rather than on himself to lift the load of his sorrow and to redeem the future. To Kumalo, prayer is indispensible, and he often prays in moments of crisis and thanksgiving. For example, upon emerging from the train station to the bustling streets of Johannesburg, Kumalo is overwhelmed with anxiety: "His heart beat like that of a child, there is nothing to do or think to stop it. Tixo[Lord], watch over me, he says to himself. Tixo, watch over me" (17). In most realistic novels prayer is scarce, possibly because of the risk of mingling the purity of God's love with the hypocrisy of man's good intentions. But for Kumalo, prayer of all kinds--in church buildings, with other Christians, and in his mind-is natural and necessary.

When events turn for the good at the end of the story, Kumalo attributes them to God's care for him and his Christian flock. Actually, Kumalo's parishoners, his wife, and his fellow Christians in Johannesburg frequently encourage him. Often when downcast, his wife, his fellow priest, Msimangu, or Father Vincent, counsel him to keep believing in God's goodness. As a result of the closeknit relationship between these Christians, the novel has more a cadre of Christian heroes, all sharing the qualities discussed in this section, rather than a solitary Christian champion or Christ-like figure to whom the other characters look for redemption. In a sense, then, the concept of Christian heroism that emerges from Cry, the Beloved Country is that the church, God's people, hold the hope for regenerating society.

Zossima, Alyosha, and Kumalo succeed because they are so much like us; they too are torn between good and evil, hope and despair, life and death. It is in their psychological struggles that we see ourselves and this causes us to empathize with them. In their pictures of these men who overcome their struggles, who elect to choose goodness, and who go on to love forcefully and honestly, Dostoyevsky and Paton have indeed succeeded in producing exemplary Christian heroes.

We would be less than candid, however, if we did not point out that exemplary Christians characters like Zossima, Alyosha and Kumalo are relatively rare. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is the danger that such characters can verge on the saintly, and, as Konstatin Mochulsky has noted: "Sanctity is not a literary theme" (346) Implicit here is the idea that the story of saint--a truly good, virtuous, and consistently holy person--is outside the realm of realistic fiction because it is concerned with "real" or "ordinary" characters. Consequently, we expect to read about characters who share the same tensions, failures, blind-spots, inconsistencies, and confusions that we do. Saints, by definition, do not and so cannot appear as believeable characters in realistic fiction. In addition, "a novel about Christ is impossible" (346). Why? Christ was a real, historical being; to write about Him might work in a historical prose narrative like the Gospels, but a writer would be hard-pressed to create a convincing Christ in realistic fiction since the genre itself is concerned not with what has happened in history, but with what could. Furthermore, although Christ could appear as the hero of an epic like Paradise Lost, He would be very much out of place in a realistic novel since the novel exults in the ordinary, the everyday.

A second reason exemplary Christians are rare in realistic fiction is related to the first; that is, how can authors, who are not themselves exemplary, create fictional characters who are? This authorial problem is addressed in length in C. S. Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost:

If we add to this difficulty the responsibility of creating exemplary Christian characters, the authorial problem is compounded even further.

A third reason that exemplary Christians appear infrequently in realistic fiction has to do with their potential for undercutting the drama or tension often implicit in the narrative. Realistic fiction tends to focus on an individual character's experience; many times fiction charts this character's search within the fictional world for order and sense.

Part of the attraction for us as readers is that we find ourselves identifying with the character's search both overtly and covertly. We enjoy being involved in his life, especially as he gropes about his world and grows through his experiences. When we confront an exemplary Christian (or any other exemplary religious character), we are suddenly faced with the possibility that a search can have an ending. And even though many of us may not wish to admit it, we tend to react against a character who seems "to have it all together." In a sense then, we are instinctively biased against any exemplary character, Christian or otherwise.

Certainly there may be other reasons for the rare appearance of the exemplary Christian hero in realistic fiction. We do not claim to have exhausted all the possible explanations. What remains for us, therefore, is to issue a challenge. Since exemplary Christian characters--be they repentant, self-reliant, God-reliant, or otherwise--can be the focus of a realistic novel, more novelists ought to attempt to portray them, notwithstanding the difficulties mentioned in this essay. Why? We return to James in order to answer this question: "The province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision." James suggests that all writers, Christian or agnostic, have the responsibility to communicate the reality of human experience in all its many dimensions--physical, mental, and spiritual. Writers who reject the idea that an exemplary Christian character can occupy their fictional worlds are clearly not attempting to represent reality in all its richness and variety. In the final analysis, fictional worlds that have no room for exemplary Christian characters are no more real than ones that are populated only by such characters.

Notes

* In order to clarify the boundaries of our discussion, we wish to define the realistic novel in as inclusive a manner as possible. Two points need to be made. First, we recognize the varied and often confusing literary and philosophical uses of the term "realistic." However, we are intentionally using the phrase "realistic novel" in a generic fashion; that is, by realistic novel we mean extended prose fiction that takes as its focus everyday human experience. Indeed, we accept Ian Watt's conception of the novel as a "full and authentic report of human experience" (Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957], p. 32). Consequently, we are interested in the modern novel from the eighteenth century on, and our examples will range broadly in the genre, with particular emphasis given to nineteenth and twentieth-century novels. Second, following from our first point, we are not concerned with romance, fantasy, or science fiction; those genres, although sometimes filled with exemplary Christians (witness C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia), by definition are not concerned with a full and authentic report of human experience.

** In The Notebooks for the Idiot, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), we read that Dostoyevsky was aware of Myshkin's limitations: "I am not happy with the novel [The Idiot]: it does not express even a tenth of what I wished to express. Although, nevertheless, I will not disclaim it, and I still love my idea even though it has not succeeded" (89).

***In his Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky To hisFamily and Friends, trans. Ethel Colburn Mayne (New York: Horizon Press, 1961), Dostoyevsky reveals his affection for Christ: "Because I myself have learnt it and gone through it, I want to say to you that in such moments, one does, 'like dry grass,' thirst after faith, and that one finds it in the end, solely and simply because one sees the truth more clearly when one is unhappy. I want to say to you, about myself, that I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism, and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully has it tormented me (and torments me even now)--this longing for faith, which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it. And yet God gives me sometimes a moments of perfect peace; in such moments I love and believe that I am loved; in such moments I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simple, here it is: I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than the Saviour; I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one. I would say even more: If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside truth, and if truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth" (70-71).

Works Cited

Bronte, Emily. Jane Eyre. New York: New American Library, 1960

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Diary of a Writer. 2 volumes. Trans. Boris Brasol.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Ed. Ralph Matlaw. New York:

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