road. We see, and Sethe intuits, that what’s coming in the front gate is the Apocalypse. When the Four
Horsemen come, it’s the Last Day, the time for Judgment. Morrison’s color scheme isn’t quite that of St.
John’s original—it’s hard to come up with a green horse—but we know them, not least because she
actually calls them “the four horsemen.” Not riders, not men on horses, not equestrians. Horsemen.
That’s pretty unambiguous. Moreover, one of them stays mounted with a rifle slung across his lap. That
looks a lot like the fourth horseman, the one who in Revelation rides the pale (or green) horse and whose
name is Death. In Pale Rider Clint Eastwood actually has a character speak the relevant passage so we
don’t miss the point (althoughp. 49the unnamed stranger in an Eastwood western is pretty much always
Death), but here Morrison does the same with a three-word phrase and a pose. Unmistakable.
So when the Apocalypse comes riding up your lane, what will you do?
And that is why Sethe reacts as she does.
Morrison is American, of course, and raised in the Protestant tradition, but the Bible is nonsectarian.
James Joyce, an Irish Catholic, uses biblical parallels with considerable frequency. I often teach his story
“Araby” (1914), a lovely little gem about the loss of innocence. Another way of saying “loss of
innocence,” of course, is “the Fall.” Adam and Eve, the garden, the serpent, the forbidden fruit. Every
story about the loss of innocence is really about someone’s private reenactment of the fall from grace,
since we experience it not collectively but individually and subjectively. Here’s the setup: a young
boy—eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, right in there—who has previously experienced life as safe,
uncomplicated, and limited to attending school and playing cowboys and Indians in the Dublin streets
with his friends, discovers girls. Or specifically, one girl, his friend Mangan’s sister. Neither the sister nor
our young hero has a name, so his situation is made slightly generic, which is useful. Being in early
adolescence, the narrator has no way of dealing with the object of his desire, or even the wherewithal to
recognize what he feels as desire. After all, his culture does all it can to keep boys and girls separate and
pure, and his reading has described relations between the sexes in only the most general and chaste of
terms. He promises to try to buy her something from a bazaar, the Araby of the title, to which she can’t
go (significantly, because of a religious retreat being put on by her convent school). After many delays
and frustrations, he finally arrives at the bazaar just as it’s closing. Most of the stalls are closed, but he
finally finds one wherep. 50a young woman and two young men are flirting in ways that are not very
appealing to our young swain, and she can scarcely be bothered to ask what he wants. Daunted, he says
he wants nothing, then turns away, his eyes blinded by tears of frustration and humiliation. He suddenly
sees that his feelings are no loftier than theirs, that he’s been a fool, that he’s been running this errand on
behalf of an ordinary girl who’s probably never given him a single thought.
Wait a minute. Innocence maybe. But the Fall?
Sure. Innocence, then its loss. What more do you need?
Something biblical. A serpent, an apple, at least a garden.
Sorry, no garden, no apple. The bazaar takes place inside. But there are two great jars standing by the
booth, Joyce says, like Eastern guards. And those guards are as biblical as it gets: “So he drove out the
man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned
every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” That would be Genesis 3:24 for those of you keeping
score. As we all know, there’s nothing like a flaming sword to separate you from something, and in this
case that something is a former innocence, whether of Eden or of childhood. The thing about
loss-of-innocence stories, the reason they hit so hard, is that they’re so final. You can never go back.
That’s why the boy’s eyes sting with blinding tears—it’s that flaming sword.