Saramago Deconstructs Authority Of The God

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain are two of Saramago’s attempts to liberate human from the God. But the target of Saramago’s rebellion is not the holy God but the unjust traditional power symbolized by the God. In primitive society, human regarded gods as symbols of nature power, which was over human; then religion appeared, the God from the Bible became not only the redeemer but also the symbol of race, nation and spiritual ruler. Certainly, protests rise from time to time, like religion reforms, the enlightenment, romanticism, etc, it’s even more complicated in the modern time. Thereinto, Saramago is quite permanent. For Saramago, the God become a metaphor of traditional power.Therefore, Saramago’s deconstruction of the God is not aim to charge religion but to tentatively solve the power inequality problem in real world through his analysis and deconstruction. And this, is also the gist of this article. In The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain those two successive works, Saramago interpreted and deconstructed the legitimacy of God’s authority through character relationships between human and the God. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ revealed that the God haven’t meet his engagement with human, he’ve lost the foundation of his authority, but Jesus still lost his battle. Cain killed human, the object of God’s power, liberated the human beings as a whole by breaking down the power structure. The relationship between the God and human reflected by character relationships is no longer like the Bible: human betrayed the God, committed crimes, need the God to judge and punish, but the God brutally dominated human. Believe-inspire relationship shifts to submit-dominate relationship, and the latter is totally a relationship between citizen and state, while this state is a one-God government. From narrative elements, Saramago picked narrative time as his very important rebelling tool: the Bible set the God as the narrate focal point, while Saramago set human as his narrate focal point. The Bible built God’s predestination and heaven teleology, while Saramago disordered the linear time to give human the same knowledge God has of time, built up a spatiotemporal chaos to finally realize the equality between human and the God on time, and then broke down God’s predestination and heaven teleology, thereby deconstructed God’s privileged position to human. No doubt, by anti-God, anti-religious illusions, Saramago was trying to break after-life illusions, and then encourage people to pay actual actions, to enjoy the real life happiness. Notably, Saramago never tried to kill or challenge the God directly, or encourage any bloody revolution. Should say, Saramago was calling an ideal introspection on God’s authority. Saramago fused the advantages of modern and postmodern ideas together, use them as ideological weapons against despotism and dictatorship. Surely, Saramago has his own limitations, readers should stay cautious and accept his works critically.