The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
“Five American women narrate the dismantling of a family — and an entire continent — by one man's arrogant certainty that he alone knows God's will.”
Character Analysis
A WWII survivor of Bataan who returned broken and reforged into certainty. He is never wrong, never listening, never capable of the self-examination that would show him what he is doing. His refusal to adapt — the failed garden, the ignored warnings, the insistence on baptizing people in a crocodile river — is the novel's organizing tragedy. Kingsolver's choice not to let him narrate is a formal argument: his interiority adds nothing. What matters is what he does to others.
Biblical cadence — declarative, authoritative, referencing scripture in every utterance. Commands more than communicates.