Under Joshua’s
Shadow

Author’s Notes: “Literary Themes & Threads”
A fictional story with mature themes and intertextuality of nature, psychology, religion, myth, philosophy, and mysticism contribute to the novel’s linear yet rich plot that reaches for existential higher meaning — if higher meaning exists. Afterall, it is a dark romance novel. The dark themes in “Under Joshua’s Shadow” are essentially a nod to the 20th century authors such as John Steinbeck and George Orwelll, who wrote about bleak and harsh realities of the human condition Post-World War II. I aimed to explore characters who inherited a generational consciousness of doubt from the 20th century which casts a skeptical view of faith in human goodness. That said, I am working on a sequel that attempts to reconsider that perspective. In this novel, there are variable levels of introspection among the two main characters, Tom and Joshua. In different quests for love, one character reclaims his spirituality, while the other discerns it. Characters dig deep or reach beyond themselves as they experience budding needs, grief, floundering sense of purpose, and fleeting transcendent experiences, only to be held back by laws of nature which remind them of their human tolerances as topics of doubt and faith intermingle. There is a lot of language to consider in this novel as images, metaphors, subtext, symbolism, and repeated motifs reveal what plot cannot explain alone. Although narrative builds up around the plot, character development is not always central to the plot. It is essential to compare and contrast details in this novel to make your own inferences about character development. The plot also unfolds around loose parable and allegorical references from biblical names and Jungian archetypes. I also mixed Plato’s aesthetics for logic and sensibility and added Aristotle’s dramatic aesthetic for tons of visual props for readers to have fun discovering deeper meaning. I find it enjoyable when readers share with me their own interpretations they personally identify with. For example, water is a classic motif throughout the novel. I thought about the traditional use of water from literary readings when water represented a metaphor for turning of tides/rising and falling. Slave narratives described how water could both contain and set one free crossing a river to escape slavery. In biblical terms, water was used to represent the source of life and spiritual cleansing. I thought about literary theory from my literature courses at Chaffey College and the University of LaVerne. Classical concepts on how to organize and understand literature allowed me to better discern reality, but literary theory also made me aware that complete understanding is not possible because there is always more to learn. When I considered traditional concepts like logic/factual exposition, I wanted to create a believable fictional story, yet I also wanted to produce a contemporary novel in which characters experience feelings within a multicultural and multidimensional modern reality. For example, I intersected Plato’s ladder of love with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as both pyramid theories are about higher purpose. Although linear versus multi-connected realities do compete for space in my story, I structured a story that made sense to readers, with minimal use of foreshadowing, flashback, excessive narrator interference, or jarring surreal shifts in scenes. You will notice a narrator usually chimes in at the end of each chapter rather than throughout the story. But human feelings, fantasies, and dreams are major themes in my novel, for they represent subjective moments of consciousness, so there is an intersection between a Platonian order, and a humanistic perspective. Such juxtapositions reveal the visual contours of duality, and you will notice polarity in scenes about mountain altitude(ascent/descent), earth & sky, seasons, liquids, day & night, to more ephemeral images like light/shadow, color, temperature. Natural conditions are not binary, but there is no hierarchy in nature, as humans forms them, rather spectrum and gradient is the rule in nature. Thus, I was attempting to feel the center. In a world where absolutism of religion says God is nature and scientific precepts say nature operates by laws, neither side explains the exceptions or the outliers, so while religion has angels to visit earth and nature has birds to flee it, it is crucial to see how characters cross such intersections as they are left navigating the gaps. Yet, it is at the center of these opposing views, gravity is always pulling or pushing on everything at once, and characters evolve within that singular gravitational vortex. Ironically, a built-up story environment, which is crucial to stability, ultimately serves memory, but my characters grapple with their memory or have anxiety of budding new memories. The questions allude my characters, do they burn down memory for change, or do they carry memory into the future? When thoughts of ‘we grew apart’ feed the mind, then characters need to discern how love involves self-change and reciprocity. Does choosing love involve rejecting the memory of the old landscape, does it involve building upon it, or does it simply move away? Do you reject your partner because of the past, or do you cling onto them while you fear the future? Trees often remind me of characters. Space can be anchored apart between lovers who grow in the solidness of earth where the insecure seeds sprout unspoken roots and remain hidden in the darkness of soil. Perhaps their shoots grow upward toward the light, but what happens when roots sprout up anger, or worse, get uprooted? This is a metaphoric question of course and Plato believed a good story needed guidance according to logic to avoid emotional speculation and social disruption. But disruption is the point? It is important to point out this story about two lovers who exist outside the social order where wind literally blows them about. Forces play a role in my novel to show how they impact characters. For example, weather is a representation of systems like religion which can exert power over people. In the pursuit of building closeness, in two different geographical settings, the main characters seek out each other in a misaligned way. On a perfect clear day, absolute truth and beauty are lucid, but they are less lucid by states of yearning, nostalgia, grief, or poor esteem. Lovers will continue to test each other’s worth all the way to the bitter end or worse question their own self-worth, as characters feel pressure to seek truth and beauty in isolation when a relationship really demands closer proximity. For Plato, the highest form of love did not grow from a distorted sentiment to one person that would inevitably get old; instead, true love grew when it is revealed in a universal way – when one saw beauty in all people and things. Despite bloody scenes, I want the dark tones to make the reader to see from the center between life and death, acceptance and judgment, trust and rejection, trauma and resilience which ultimately expose the gaps of love when attachment (salvation/judgment) and integration(liberation/self-wholeness) work for and against each other. I simply accommodated two male characters, with their intimate needs at the center of a disarrayed love, in which their own ways of love can be only understood and experienced by only them, within a landscape of dogma, myth, biology, and behavior — to arrive to their own sense of truth and beauty which was actually Plato’s highest goal for all people. So, despair would not anchor them down, evolving intuition pushed the characters forward. Sadly, religion looks down on intuition. When characters intuitively form love through a sense of home, it also rationalizes a past condition or a past transactional guarantee that contradicts becoming fully who they are, and this is what I try to drill home in the novel. Characters intuitively realize, perhaps too late, they only find the singular self at the end — only after the guarantee has expired. I want the reader to see how love and spirituality are sacred processes for personal growth. It was my attempt to write a story apart from the typical queer male genre often about coming out within a landscape of sex, drugs, and rock-n- roll, in replace of a story about a queer relationship and individual growth. Therefore, sexual identity is not used as spectacle; it is used to enhance intimacy separated by walls of incarceration within the context of expectations and partnership, and how those dynamics interplay within that separateness inside and outside the walls of incarceration and community. Love may buckle under demands, but it does not mean love is broken. It means love can be stressed while something else heals simultaneously — a sort of restorative justice for love. The question is, in this novel, will justice prevail or is there a groundbreaking for something new?