In Their Own Words -- Stephen Dau
To create the character of Jonas, I drew heavily upon my own experiences as a teenager during that crucial period of transition between high school and college. In The Book of Jonas, Jonas's coming-of-age tribulations are exacerbated by profound senses of loss and displacement, but the underlying issues would be familiar to anyone living through or remembering that age: the need to sort out one's place in the world, the new-found sense of freedom, questions of love and sex, and, perhaps above all of these, the growing awareness of the impact of one's own decisions. In fact, if I had to describe the story's single most dominant theme, it would be this concept of personal responsibility, not in the banal way it is so often used in current public discourse, but in the real and immediate sense of owning the consequences of one's own actions.
In many ways, The Book of Jonas is about the process of taking responsibility. While this takes various forms in the story—a soldier taking responsibility for the actions of his company, or a mother questioning her responsibility for her son's decisions—centrally located is Jonas's struggle with his own actions, and their far-reaching consequences. The idea that at any given moment we have a choice about what to do next is recurrent.
When I've talked about the book in college classrooms, the discussion usually ends up revolving around these issues of choice and consequence. Many of the students have friends or family who have joined the military, or are themselves considering doing so after college, often after a decision-making process similar to the one Christopher undertakes in the book. Students seem more connected with the characters in the book than they do with events they read about in textbooks or see on the news, and this tends to facilitate the conversation. Also, students at this age are faced with myriad new choices, some of which seem important, some of which don't, their relative importance only becoming obvious in retrospect, and this is another of the book's themes.
In truth, I never set out to write a meditation on personal responsibility, choice and consequence, action and impact. All I really wanted to do was tell a good story. But perhaps it was almost inevitable that the narrative wound up shaped and colored the way it is. If I'm candid, I can admit that the story's initial inspiration came in part from anger at the wars in which the US seemed to be continuously entwining itself, and the almost total lack of responsibility taken for their consequences. This decision—the nation's decision to go to war in the first place—is the backdrop against which the entire story plays out, which has fueled occasionally heated classroom discussions. That said, I don't consider the book to be particularly political. I strove to humanize all sides of the story and to demonize none, and to draw no conclusions about “rightness” and “wrongness,” apart from the consequences of specific choices.
The story covers the last half of Jonas's teenage years, from the time he is a relatively blameless fifteen year old living in an unnamed Middle Eastern country until he is more-aware freshman at college in the United States. His journey mirrors the journey I took during that period of my own life, if not in terms of physical location and a uniquely excoriating loss, then in terms of mental geography and emotional maturity. In other words, his story broadly resonates with my own experience of that time, as it does, so I have heard, with others'. And while reading it may be emotionally difficult, at least in places, it is also, I think, undergirded by a profound sense of optimism, by a conviction that, in the midst of horrendous circumstances, our shared humanity will win out, if only we let it.
