The Fall and the Fiction Writer

Abstract

Locating the impulse of story-making in John Updike's remark to The Paris Review that “unfallen Adam is an ape,” I argue that only by virtue of the original act of sin, and the consequent revelation of good and evil, did we acquire free will, and that our legacy is that of self-consciousness and mortality—the understanding, because we see ourselves as God does, that we bear responsibility for good and evil, and that being freed from the threat of death by the inevitability of it, we can choose between them. This free will, and the attendant capacities for shame and radical empathy, is best realized in the character-driven narratives of modern and contemporary fiction writers.