Book of Jon - Analysis

Denise Bateman

Joseph Cooper

CRWR 212Y

May 5, 2014

 

The Book of Jon – Analysis

 

Eleni Sikelianos’ The Book of Jon is a tribute to her father, a combination of her poems, open prose, and journal entries that chronicle his life and his life’s impact upon his family. She writes with astonishingly candid honesty about her father’s heroin addiction. As a daughter of a father who fought his own battle with alcohol addiction, I found this piece to be hauntingly heartbreaking in its raw, unapologetic remembrances. I struggled to get through the book.

 The theme of addiction, whether it be narcotics or alcohol, is all too familiar to too many of us. wondered as I read through the pages why Sikelianos’ chose to write about her father’s addiction. Was it to help her make sense of her childhood? Was she trying to connect or identify, perhaps resolve in some way, her father’s inability to choose his family and health over a momentary drug-induced high? She seems to understand her love for her father and his imperfections even in that “here you are, part of a long, boring trend of absent fathers and junk-high assholes” (pg 7) reflection.  I believe her goal with The Book of Jon was to recognize her own internal conflict with her father, somehow giving herself permission to love this flawed man regardless of his addictions and to forgive him for the harm he caused her and others. I believe all daughters want to love their fathers. In the perfect world, in the hearts and flowers world society paints for us, fathers should be loving, doting role models for their daughters – someone who nurtures their child and provides stability for them. When that is not the case, how does one reconcile the preconceived notion of what a perfect father should be with the reality one ends up with in real life? Sikelianos speaks of the childhood father she would have wanted to have had on pages 32-33, musing that what she would have wanted would have been a father that came to see her regularly, gave up his addiction and replaced it with a regular job, nice home, and a future relationship with him in which she can visit for holidays and reflect on good times from her childhood. But sadly, as she confesses on page 8, she “has no hopes of you meeting grandchildren, or seeing my sister live into adulthood”. Again, the theme of reflection, of resolving the painful truth with the desired reality, permeates into her writing.

  I believe by writing about the truth of her father’s addiction, Sikelianos’ not only shows her deep affection for her father, but gives her readers (particularly those who can identify with a love/hate relationship with a father consumed by addiction) a reason to pause and reflect on their own parent/child relationships.

Although the tone of her work is sad and reflective throughout much of the work, Sikelianos’ descriptive languages and use of some beautiful similes while describing times and settings of her memories in her book give her readers much needed distraction from the ugliness of addiction.  On page eleven, she describes the night skyline in Albuquerque as seen from a plane’s view as “lights like shining asters melting at the edges”.  Page 48 she describes time as “laid out in dark gloppy hands, like black clumps of glistening seaweed stretching both ways, forward and back”.  Also on page 61 in “…winterfat bushes like chubby wicks scrubbing up the dirt”.

I found Sikelianos’ father’s admission on page 49 that while traveling cross country with his current girlfriend and most of his children from other women, regardless of the chaos with fighting with his girlfriend and having heard his daughter, Eleni, admit that she never really thought her father loved her, he felt that during that trip he was “living his family dream” simply because everyone was all together. It’s a heartbreaking scene simply because it makes you long for her father to have been strong enough to have pulled himself out of his self-imposed addictive darkness and actually lived that family dream, but yet, he was not able to do so. Is it truly as Sikelianos says on page 8 that “there are factors, chemical predisposition, habits, weaknesses of will” that prevents an addict to change?

The last chapter of her book was very effective. She collects letters from her step-mother and siblings on their own remembrances and dreams of her father after he had passed away. Interesting to see how each had distinctively different, yet, almost each dream Joe is still alive. There is a tone of spirituality about this…how each reader will interpret this is greatly due I suppose to their own spiritual and religious beliefs, but, in the most basic sense, it seems to speak to love transcending death. Love is greater than death, and once a person has been a part of your life, they remain, even after death. Sikelianos summarizes one opinion of our life from Dante’s viewpoint, that we are only ghosts of our true self while on earth and only find our complete self when he break free from this world (pg 106).

The most difficult part of the book to read for me was the section on pages 100 – 101 when the writer speaks of the material possessions in her father’s pockets on the day he passed away. In a box in the top of my closet, I have such a collection from my own father. Things he had in his wallet and work clothes pockets the day he died. There was a pair of green dice that he always carried for luck, brought back from Korea when he was in the army. A gold pocket watch that I gave him as a Christmas gift when I was sixteen. Pictures in his wallet – one of me at age seven, another from my high school graduation, and a picture of my mother and himself from 1962 while they were still dating. A Red Cross blood donor’s card, crumpled and well-used. In the end, do just a few things like this sum up a man’s life? His desire for luck, family that loved him, time?

I think that Sikelianos did an excellent job of capturing a daughter’s reflections on her father. She looked at the imperfections of the man, attempted to analyze his life and his actions, but ultimately concedes that while he may not have been the man nor father she would have wanted, he was still her father, and loving him was never a question.