I need someone to be as passionate and weird about this album as I am. I need to know I’m not alone. But for that I need to actually talk about it. It has been like, my favorite piece of art since I found it last year, but I’ve just kinda hoarded my thoughts to myself. I guess I worry I won’t be able to cover every detail about what makes this album so good, so I don’t even bother. I don’t know. I’ve gotten to Joe Biden Mayonnaise levels of media analysis. I need someone to peer review me before I get even more pretentious.
Okay, so, current running theory:
Prodigal by David Wirsig is a loose, trifold adaptation of the Book of Job. It is a story of how we respond to abuse from family, friends, and faith. It deviates from Wirsig’s other apocalyptic work in that it depicts a personal, everyday apocalypse.
It would be inaccurate to say it’s a story about a story, or a story within a story, but it is a story that is aware it’s a story, with a narrator that is aware that by telling it, he is weaving it into existence. It opens with legal disclaimers and “in the beginning”s. It ends with cry for an ending. Our narrator is both hapless bystander and negligent perpetrator.
Much like Job, Prodigal asks the question “Why does a benevolent God allow for suffering in his creation?” Much like Job, it is unable to give a satisfactory answer. This failure is far more intentional on Wirsig’s part, and seems a retort towards the biblical platitude: “Give it time, it’ll get better. It’ll get better, now go.”
The use of perspective in the album is fascinating. Our unnamed narrator, perhaps an insert of Wirsig himself, alternates between a detached omniscient nonfirst person and first person limited. Darian and the Leviathan each have songs written from their own first person point of view, though the words are still sung in Wirsig’s voice. More likely than not, this is because of the practical constraints of the project, but it does lend credence to the idea that these are characters, beholden to the narrator’s story.
Despite arguably being the subject of the story, Arielle herself has no voice, perhaps representing her abuser’s suffocating (ha) control over her social life. There is another interpretation, though, that just came to me while writing this. Arielle is the only character to fully untangle herself from the narrative— to make a path for herself from those who did her harm.
There are a lot of other smaller themes throughout the album: clerical hypocrisy, death of third spaces, the fragility of bohemia, childbirth, transformation, and more. All of this in less than an hour. Is it possible that I’ve assumed more intent than the author put in? Absolutely. But I think that just means I’m doing good at art.
