The Cult of Satan

America’s Ambiguous Heroes in
Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Kesey

“And if the music stops
There’s only the sound of the rain
All the hope and glory
All the sacrifice in vain
If love remains
Though paradise is lost
We will pay the price
But we will not count the cost.”

—“Bravado” by Neal Peart

Paradise was a dull place. Just what did the archetypal patriarch expect humans to do living their lives in the Garden of Eden? Even before the creation of Earth, Lucifer found the living conditions in God’s kingdom to be less-than-perfect and decided some changes needed to be made. Lucifer acted, was cast down, and became Satan, the epitome of evil, and the paradigmatic rebel. The ex-Lucifer’s revolt became the genesis of the Christian interpretation of evil; anything that Satan has a hand in, the Christian myth reads, is necessarily evil. Yet, with the systematic destruction of countless lives during World War I, the absolutes that defined good and evil became ambiguous: what was once considered good had lost its appeal in the aftermath of the war. The idea of a benevolent God no longer seemed tenable when juxtaposed with the meaningless carnage of WWI. New gods emerged from the rubble to replace those that had fallen. New heroes would also be needed for this lost generation.

The old heroes and absolutes fell by the wayside in America. The gods were replaced with new tyrannies, ostensibly freer deities based upon money, race, and power, yet just as destructive and oppressive as the old. Good and evil were not as clearly defined anymore, and a new race of American lemmings initiated a new American, materialistic fascism. The literature in America after the first World War reacts against these new gods, and a new batch of ambiguously-moraled hero would be needed to eschew the new, less-clearly-defined evil; good-bye go the classical Christian heroes in this new age. The new hero, instead of Christ-like passivity, must act, sometimes violently, against those that seek to control his life. While many of these heroes have Christ-like qualities, most are more closely akin to Milton’s Satan.

Scholars have often noted the heroic and charismatic qualities of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Milton’s Prince of Darkness via the felix culpa, ironically, became humanity’s savior. Without the influence of Satan, Adam and Eve and all their scions would not have been cast out of God’s garden and would have been sentenced to an eternity doing nothing but divine botany. God obviously felt that these bushes needed an infinity of care, otherwise He would not have created humans to tend them obediently, like robots. Fortunately Satan came along to show them the way to their humanity, to self-discovery, and choice.

Such Satanic figures are the new heroes of American Literature after World War I. These heroes are not content with the way things are, i.e. with someone, or something, controlling their lives, and prove to be messiahs to others of acuity. Specifically, Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Sam Fathers in Faulkner’s The Bear, and McMurphy in Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest are representative of the dualistic Satan-Savior figure in the American novel after World War I. Each of these men, as Fitzgerald’s title suggests, are great in that they influence three other men to take control of their lives, to cast off the oppression and inhumanity of their society, and, Adam and Eve-like, enter the world with new eyes, a new sense of individuality, and the ability to conceive and control their own destinies.

Relieved to be out of World War I, the citizens of America could direct their attention toward the important things in life: making money and having fun. Fitzgerald offers a glimpse into a typical summer night at the Gatsby mansion: a menagerie of “melodious names of flowers and months” (67). Vacuous and ephemeral, these Leeches, Civets, Bulls, Catlips, Blackbucks, Endives, and Duckweeds prance and pose little better than beasts — professional spongers all (66–7). These people represent the masses, the wastelanders, caught in a breeze of nepenthe, floating from party to party unaware that life could offer anything other then pretension and ostentation. Their lives usually end violently and carelessly, victims of their own vices: drowning, automobile crashes, fights, and violence toward each other — basically “for no good reason at all” (66). Representatives of this group are Tom and Daisy Buchanan, George and Myrtle Wilson, and Jordan Baker.

This life practiced by Tom and his ilk holds a fascination for Nick Carraway. As his name suggests, Nick is carried away by the figure of Gatsby, yet not before he attempts to carve a niche for himself in the world of money-seekers: he has his own interaction with the cast of wastelanders, even a romantic affair with Jordan Baker. A perspicacious narrator, he withholds his judgment until he has seen the entire picture; this trait saves him from the doomed fate of the wastelanders, and Gatsby himself. On a quest for his grail, Nick is a knight in the wasteland that maintains a hope of finding meaning and an eventually understanding about “what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out [his] interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men” so it does not prey upon him (6–7).

Gatsby’s dream, his grail, is Tom Buchanan’s wife Daisy. In an attempt to win Daisy, Gatsby becomes successful in the eyes of society, i.e. he goes from rags to riches. Satan-like, Gatsby accumulates his wealth dubiously through his relations with Dan Cody and Meyer Wolfshiem, even changing his name from James Gatz to the more socially-acceptable, Jay Gatsby. Yet, as Carraway points out, Gatsby retained a child-like innocence — a “romantic readiness” — that sets him apart from the other wastelanders (6). Gatsby represents the great dreamer in a world that destroys dreamers; he knows what will make him happy and will do anything to achieve that goal — anything to win Daisy — even if it means injuring others in the process.

Yet Daisy herself inhabits the Wasteland. She originally turned him down because of his poverty, and Gatsby lacks the intelligence to see her for what she is: another pretty, substanceless flower. She dazes him with her charms and he naively pursues her even after she marries the simple-minded Tom Buchanan. In this way, Gatsby deserves Carraway’s disdain because he embodies the single-mindedness of a wastelander — not doing what he wants to do, but doing those things that he is expected by his milieu to win Daisy. This devotion to Daisy, and his willingness to sacrifice anything for her love, shows Gatsby’s drive to define his own life while it betrays his sociopathic tendencies. He little cares for anyone but himself and Daisy and remains naively untouched by his morally equivocal actions; ironically, Daisy is just another pretty flower in the dust, not worthy of Gatsby’s devotion. Gatsby’s monomania is both Carraway’s redemption and his own downfall.

A victim of the lifestyle he has adopted, Gatsby lies dead at the novel’s close — a sacrificed dreamer. In an attempt to create and surround himself with his own fairy kingdom, Gatsby became the victim of one of those wastelandic accidents. George Wilson, in his foggy, wastlandic stupor, blames Gatsby for the death of his wife; ironically, Daisy’s carelessness accidentally kills Myrtle — running her down in Gatsby’s car — and subsequently causes the death of Gatsby. How can any truth and lucidity come from living a dazed life? Like Milton’s Satan, Gatsby remains the ambiguous hero. Gatsby succumbed to Daisy’s siren song while attempting to realize his dream, and he “dreamed it right through to the end” (97). He had attempted to realize his dream by adopting the idiom of the wasteland. Gatsby was not smart enough to see the inevitable consequences, and he was run over by his own “death-car” (144).

Gatsby’s life was indeed a dream. He passed through the lives of the wastelanders, distracted them for a time, and was unmissed when he vanished. None of the summer menagerie came to his funeral — not fun or profitable — and his mansion lingers, huge and vacant, covered with the dust of his passing and reabsorbed by the wasteland. Daisy and Tom are left unaffected by their experiences with Gatsby, as are Gatsby’s business associates and acquaintances. Gatsby’s passing affected none of the non-thinkers, yet Nick Carraway is redeemed by his short interaction with the great Gatsby.

After Gatsby’s death, Carraway decides that he is “unadaptable to Eastern life” — to this world that crushes dreamers (184). He decides that he must return home to put his own lands in order (185). Jordan Baker symbolizes his final break with the denizens of the East. This break is bittersweet, for part of Carraway still finds that life, represented by Jordan, somewhat attractive: “angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, [he] turned away” (186). Effectively Carraway turns away from the Jordans and Daisys who now represent the wilted flowers of a corrupt America in the East.

However, hope burns for Carraway, rekindled by his relations with Gatsby. Carraway now sees the future as those first pioneers saw America: the land of opportunity. Before this vision was obfuscated by the drive for wealth and power, now Carraway’s imagination, unclouded by his relations with Gatsby, can see through that smoke to his own individuality — his own personal America. Carraway views the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, not as Gatsby naively saw it, but with the clarity of moving ahead with one’s life and not attempting to re-live the past. Like those Dutch sailors first catching a glimpse of America, Carraway’s America lives before him “commensurate [with] his capacity for wonder” (189). The paradise has not been lost, but is about to be discovered, not in the morally bankrupt and naive way that Gatsby approached his dream, but with a clear sense of compassion, imagination, and individuality. Finally, there is a carpe diem message to The Great Gatsby. One must realize one’s dream and set off in its pursuit with a pragmatism that will not allow self-deception, but being careful to never lose sight of that holy grail of imagination that keeps one free, not a naive victim of society and time.

In his chapter on Absalom, Absalom!, Edmond Volpe states that in Faulkner’s view of time and history a single entity is born, lives, and dies into the continuum of reality (200). Like a pebble thrown in a pool, the ensuing waves intersect the corrugations of other’s lives, thus influencing them and controlling history. Many of Faulkner’s Southern Patriarchs, like Thomas Stupen and Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, make the biggest waves of all in an attempt to control the wake of everyone around them. These patriarchs care not for the humanity of others, but only for the perpetuation their own designs. Therefore, “niggers” and “white trash” become something less-than-human in the eyes of the society constructed and maintained by these “heroic” patriarchs.

Filial obligation and its concomitant inhumanity oppresses and subjugates the characters in The Bear. A mythical and prejudiced hierarchy exists in Faulkner’s novel, carried over from the ante-bellum South — a mind-set legally, if not actually, vanquished by the Civil War. Weather or not this inhumanity is allowed to continue, at least in the McCaslin family, is for Isaac McCaslin to decide. Though not even an active part of the novel, L. Q. C. McCaslin’s influence over the present represents the threat to individuality and humanity, while the Satanic figure of Sam Fathers helps Ike undermine the hold of L. Q. C. McCaslin on his history and future.

The action of The Bear commences under the guise of the metaphorical hunt. Faulkner illustrates, in this return to nature, an attempt to embrace an essential humanity that has been lost by the imposed order of society. There is a truth in nature that society has “tamed out” of its members’ blood, making them sub-human (Volpe 241). Ike McCaslin is a product of this environment; he represents the only remaining McCaslin who must meet his filial obligation, i.e. to carry on the McCaslin dynasty. Yet, through the discovery of his grandfather’s sordid and inhuman past, his own deep feelings and humanity, and an alternate, more humane, way to live through Sam Fathers, Ike becomes the willing disciple of what his society would deem evil.

Sam Fathers represents the lowest denominator on the South’s social hierarchy; he is a hybrid of black and Indian — in essence, untouchable. Yet, in nature, Fathers reigns supreme and, therefore, leads the hunt. Fathers assists Ike in removing that ersatz, societal being, replacing the hierarchy and the accoutrements of that structure with a glimpse of that essential self that is undernourished in societal man. The false man is stripped away and, ironically, shown to be humanity’s bête noire that keeps one from knowing what it truly means to be human: “It was in him too, a little different because they were brute beasts and he was not, but only a little different” (200). The tainted man is stripped away and only then can Ike face the bear, Faulkner’s equivalent of Melville’s white whale: “So I will have to see him, he thought, without dread or even hope. I will have to look at him” (204). Only upon relinquishing his gun, watch, and compass — objects that impose order and direction — can Ike look upon Old Ben.

With the assent of Fathers’ guidance, and the subsequent encounter with Old Ben, Ike must look closely at the truth that they represent. In accepting Fathers’ instruction, Ike faces the inhumanity of a society epitomized by his grandfather, L. Q. C. McCaslin. Ike’s quest continues with his delving into his family’s past. When he discovers the horror perpetrated on Thucydus, Eunice, and Tomasina by his grandfather, Ike feels that he must act. He attempts to remove the curse that he sees on the South by trying to locate the children of Tomey’s Turl, yet only discovers the grim reality of life for these people represented by the degradation and penury of Lucas. Ike decides that he must do more — more to stop the outrage of his ancestors and to ease his burden as well as society’s: “I have got myself to have to live with for the rest of my life and all I want is peace to do it in” (288). Ike has learned that he cannot profit from incest and inhumanity; he must repudiate his real grandfather and learn from his adopted one, the hybrid, untouchable Sam Fathers, who taught Ike “courage and honor and pride, and pity and love and justice of liberty. They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to becomes truth, as far as we know truth” (297). Fathers’ lesson speaks to Ike, and by embracing it, he gives up his family, his hope for a son, and his inheritance. This new truth, like the Bear, is not easy to face, but Ike accepts the lesson of Sam Fathers and admits that “Yes. Sam Fathers set me free” (300).

While Ike was able to make a positive step toward humanity, L. Q. C. McCaslin’s wake managed to destroy many lives. Hopefully, Ike’s lesson will not be lost on the rest of the South, on the rest of humanity. Sam Fathers, the rebel Satan-figure, cleared Ike’s vision of the corruption and inhumanity of his society by showing Ike the more human path, by offering him that forbidden fruit that would lead to his felix culpa.

Another Native-American hybrid appears as narrator in Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest: Chief Bromden, who, like Sam Fathers, is also a victim of his society. Bromden is called “Chief Broom,” a designation assigned to him by his oppressors for what he does — just another robot to be controlled. Other robot patients who cannot fit into the Combine surround Bromden. Most of the Acutes are volunteer patients hoping to be fixed so that they can reenter society as productive members. These Acutes lack the individual strength, courage, and imagination that would help to set them free from the destructive machinations of society, and, ironically, they are the free ones who do not fit into the Combine and submit themselves to the ministrations of Nurse Ratched for re-conditioning. Yet, with his initial appearance, the satanic Randle Patrick McMurphy begins to undermine this conditioning.

McMurphy, too, does not fit into the Combine. Yet, unlike the other Acutes and Chronics, McMurphy rebels against the Combine and does not willingly submit himself for conditioning. McMurphy’s self-reliance and will-to-freedom cannot be oppressed by the Combine’s mistress, Nurse Ratched. Ahab-like, McMurphy dispels the effluvium from around the Acutes and focuses their contempt against the Big Nurse, the impetus of their problems; he drags them out of the obfuscating fog “till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, … against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years” (124). Satan-like, McMurphy leads the revolt against the oppressive, machine-like tyranny of the Combine.

McMurphy’s influence on the patients grows throughout the novel until they adopt him as their redeemer. Initially, McMurphy is unsuccessful in his attempts to incite their indignation into action until he fails in his attempt to lift the control panel. The Acutes watch as McMurphy strains to budge the panel that could emancipate him; failing McMurphy states “ ‘But I tried though,’ he says. ‘Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn’t I?’ ” (111). McMurphy’s attempt instills within the men a confidence in McMurphy’s leadership, much in the same way his handshake did to Bromden, who felt that McMurphy “was transmitting his own blood into [Bromden’s hand]. It rang with blood and power. It blowed up near as big as his” (27). Like Sam Fathers, McMurphy also leads the men back to nature to help them rediscover their essential selves in the multiplicity of life and laughter:

While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water — laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, … and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there is a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts … but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain. (211–2).

McMurphy’s black humor and joie de vivre impact on the men so that when they return they “weren’t the same bunch of weak-knees from the nuthouse” that McMurphy lead to the sea that morning (215). They have rediscovered life on an individual basis away from the corrupting influence of the Combine.

McMurphy’s battle is not easily won, nor is it entirely successful. While he succeeds in emancipating many of the Acutes, as well as Bromden, McMurphy must ultimately sacrifice himself to free his disciples, who “couldn’t stop him because [they] were the ones making him do it” (267). McMurphy reluctantly accepts his role as savior and laughs until he is lobotomized: “Anointest my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns?” (237). But more than a passive Christ-figure, McMurphy acts with indignation against his situation. In his final act, McMurphy violently strangles the voice from his oppressor, Nurse Ratched, as she had taken the voice from the Acutes and Bromden for many years.

Finally, Bromden realizes that the Combine is not all-powerful, and this knowledge sets him free (255). He kills the lobotomized shell of McMurphy and utilizes his revitalized strength to rip the control panel from the foundation and break through the window to his literal freedom. Bromden, now free of the de-humanizing effects of the combine, and its absolute power over his identity, flees from the hospital: “I felt like I was flying. Free” (272). McMurphy’s rebellious action and sacrifice restore Bromden to life; he is no longer defined by a broom, but has been reborn to new possibility and a new chance for self-discovery and individuality.

These Satanic heroes offer the men in their respective novels choice. Any tyrannical power obliterates, or at least obfuscates, its victims’ power to choose. Tyranny imposes a determined life, absolutely free from the demanding task of choice. Satan, like Gatsby, Fathers, and McMurphy, offered people an alternative to a reliance on God’s beneficence by instilling in humans the capacity to choose their own paths, various and sundry, to salvation; besides, one person’s Heaven is another person’s Hell. Certainly God’s garden offers comfort in its security, but comfort stifles and ends in passive acceptance, tyranny, determinism, and entropy. One must take action, not for action’s sake, but meaningful action that leads along the path to existential self-discovery, self-meaning, respect for others, and caritas.