Jeremy Williams

Push Nevahda and the Vicious Circle: Scenes from a Random Life Jeremy Williams 1st edition

Williams' confessional is the space at which the sinner lets go of his wrongdoings to liberate himself ranting or releasing contents of one's actions or reactions in ways that free man from himself while setting him away from them.  But, while the author pushes out the experience, we devour it and his redemption becomes our responsibility.  In the case of Nevahda, finding redemption moves beyond the acts of sexual promiscuity or childhood molestation, for there is racial redemption that he is after, as well as religious redemption and religious deconstruction. For these elements of self-hate and self-annihilation seem to bare a relationship to the violation of his innocence at the age of 5.   Interestingly, this violation begins at the hands of a woman (his sister).  Women play a vital role in this novel, and although they are as shiftless as Nevahda it appears they may be the only ones who can set him free or redeem him from the haunting of this vicious life. For God is not the saver or redeemer here, but neither is self-redemption. For Nevahda, God cannot exist: "how sick and demented can you be to watch such tyranny, madness, and human suffering, claiming to have the power to end it all, but do nothing?" (67).  Perhaps if the God who exists, to which redemption can be given was real then Nevahda might have never come to know "a vicious life". In the end the Vicious Circle represents like God, life and death, good and evil, pain and laughter, yet it seems death, evil and pain tend to overtly engulf the novel, when one looks close enough you'll find that the text alone is redemptive, or by far one step in the lifelong process of redeeming oneself.