Jesus' Son

In the first story of the collection, the narrator, who is unnamed at this point, experiences what he interprets to be a prophetic vision of a crash that will happen in his future while hitchhiking. However, the narrator doesn’t do anything to prevent or avoid the crash, writing explicitly that he does not care what happens. Even within the first few pages of the book, the themes of The Slipperiness of Time and Violence as Inevitability are intertwined. Even if the narrator is seeing the future in his dreams, he has no ability to change what will happen and is accepting of this. This also reflects his Substance Use Disorder; someone addicted to drugs knows the future in the sense that they know their future will revolve around securing drugs by any means necessary, and if violence is a part of that, it can’t be avoided. While the narrator’s first hitchhiking experiences in the short story involve securing drugs, this final ride with the family does not. The family—a father, a mother, and a baby—represents a sort of wholesomeness that contrasts sharply with the narrator, as he lives an alternative, untraditional life and is under the influence of drugs at the time of the accident. While the narrator and the baby are unharmed, the parents are injured, which can be read as representing new beginnings and life cycles because of the young age of the baby, which also highlights the slipperiness of time in that the baby, with a full life ahead of it, may have to live without a family, hence their time together may be cut short.

Tying these themes together even more intricately is the fact that the narrator experiences these visions while under the influence of drugs; the narrator writes that before he got into the car that ends up crashing, “the salesman and I had swept down into Kansas City in his luxury car […] We ate up his bottle of amphetamines, and every so often we pulled off the Interstate and bought another pint of Canadian Club and a sack of ice” (4). Whether or not the narrator’s prescience is real or is in fact a substance-induced hallucination is irrelevant to the narrator; his future-telling doesn’t matter if he has no ability to change what happens. In the narrator’s world, violence as inevitability is a fact of life, even if he knows what will happen in the future, just as a person with substance use disorder knows the future insofar as they are sure it will involve drugs. The Slipperiness of time is further complicated by the fact that the narrative exhibits its nonlinear structure through the narrator’s recollection of an incident in a hospital that occurs years later. Additionally, in the narrator’s direct address to the audience, he demonstrates frustration, grief, and a sense of helplessness; He cannot help the family in the hospital, he cannot comfort the crying widow, and, in a sense, he cannot help himself.