Critical Analysis of "The Waters of Babylon"
Critical Analysis of "The Waters of Babylon"
Stephen Vincent Benét wrote the novel in 1937. The novel is fiction and takes place in and around New York in the future. The world as we know it has been completely destroyed, properly by one or several atom bombs. Many places have been intoxi-cated and only the priests are allowed to go there. Only a few people have survived and they have gathered in tribes, who fight each other.
The main character in the novel is a boy, from the Hill people, called John. His father is a priest. They live in a very religious society where the priests are highly respected. John has been destined to be a priest like his father right from his berth. He is now about 14 years old and is ready to begin his vision quest to gain knowledge. Actually John’ s only goal in life is to get knowledge, he knows that knowledge is power. Nine days after the journey’s beginning he reaches a big river once known as The Hudson River. His whole life he has been forbidden to go near it, but even though he fears to cross it, his hunger for knowledge pushes him forward (His father: “It is forbidden to cross the river. It is forbidden to go to the Place of the Gods).
At the other side he discovers the ruins of New York, which he thinks is the place where the Gods live. He drafts around the ruins and finds lots of remains from the human civilization. After a while a bunch of wild dogs forces him to seek hide in a big building. In the top of the building he falls in to a trance and has an “out of the body experience” (I could feel the spirits drawing my spirit out of my body as a fish is drawn on a line). His mind travels back in time and he sees the western lifestyle in New York before the nuclear war. He thinks that it is the Gods he is looking at and thinks that they are great and mighty, but slowly he realizes that they were restless, greedy and made mistakes like every-one else. Then he sees how they were destroyed by the atom bomb and feels sorry for them (It was fire falling out of the sky. It was darkness over the broken city and I...