Final thoughts on Endo's Silence and Scorsese's insights

Some final notes on Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel, Silence (had date wrong in earlier posts, and have not been able to recall spelling of his surname, so here it is), and I have to give credit to director Martin Scorsese for making this thoughtful, sometimes challenging novel into a fine, accessible, and true-to-source film - and for writing a smart intro to the new edition of the novel. A key point that MS makes that I hadn't quite appreciated: the protagonist, Father Rodrigues, imagines throughout the novel (which is to say throughout his mission to spread the gospel in 17th-century Japan), that he will face a martyrdom similar to Christ's - and many of the events in the novel to parallel the sufferings and humiliations that Jesus endured - riding through the city on the back of a donkey, betrayal by a disciple, fear and doubt in the face of torture and suffering - and Rodrigues notes all of these parallels and in a sense anticipates with hope and bravery his torture and execution. There's a certain hubris in his attitude, and in fact what he doesn't realize until the final chapters (spoilers here) is that the Japanese have outsmarted him in a sense (another point MS makes): They don't intend to torture the captive priest; rather, they will torture some of peasants who have embrace Christianity until the priest renounces his faith. What would Jesus do? Fa. R does renounce, and for the rest of his life laments that perhaps he did so out of his own fear; by the end, we see him as a sad, almost pathetic broken man - still in doubt and fear, especially at the silence of God during all of his suffering. Yes, at the very end he has a vision that Jesus was beside him throughout his ordeal - and we have to wonder about the veracity of that vision. Is he just fooling himself, or is his faith still intact at the end of his life, when he had to give up everything of his Catholic faith and in fact had to work for the Japanese central government inspecting incoming trading ships for contraband items of Christian iconography. (Scorsese's movie, if my memory serves, is a little darker in that Fa R does not have a vision of Jesus at the end of his life - but there is a hint that he was celebrating his faith secretly throughout his final years.) All told, Silence is a fine and complicated book, and, despite its remote setting in time and, for English-language readers, in place, the novel is accessible and compelling throughout. 

To order a copy of "25 Posts from Elliot's Reading: Selections from the first 2,500 blog entries," click here.