LITERATURE: Suttree and God

The ragpicker, tired of living, with Suttree. 

It won’t be long, he said.  An old man’s days are numbered.

And what happens then?

When?

After you’re dead.

Dont nothin happen.  You’re dead.

You told me once you believed in God.

The old man waved his hand.  Maybe, he said.  I got no reason to think he believes in me.  Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could.

What would you say to him?

Well, I think I’d just tell him.  I’d say:  Wait a minute.  Wait just one minute before you start in on me.  Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know.  And he’ll say:  What’s that?  And then I’m goin to ast him:  What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway?  I couldn’t put any part of it together.

Suttree smiled.  What do you think he’ll say?

The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth.  I don’t believe he can answer it, he said.  I don’t believe there is an answer.

Suttree fits in with those around him; he is educated yet has many of the same needs and wants of his friends but seems to bring out intellectual discussion in them as he might philosophize with his own peer group.  It is a simpler life, but simple represents the basics of life as a struggle and one’s ultimate death. 

Suttree has a tie with religion, one that brings him stumbling into the Catholic church where he had served, it seems, as an altar boy.  This, after being conned into helping Leonard dispose of his father’s body.  First he gets drunk, then he visits the church, quietly slipping into a pew, looking around as memories flood in (I had a similar experience recently in visiting my own church of my childhood) and falling asleep.  But is it his past that he needed to see or is it God?  When a priest awakens him, Suttree refutes the priest’s statement that it is God’s house.  What does he mean?  To Suttree, is God more likely found down by the river or in the whorehouses and bars?  Or does He exist at all?  Is it belief or hope, or guilt, or just learned behavior that drew him in?

With Cormac McCarthy, his characters have many sides, many devils, many virtues hidden in their flaws.