The Book of Daniel

Daniel’s sister Susan is one of the most tragic figures in the novel. She is introduced to the reader just after she has tried to die by suicide. Her attempt prompts Daniel to revisit their shared past to document how their traumatic experiences have affected their lives. The non-linear nature of the storyline means that she appears frequently as a child but, in the novel’s present, 1967, she is either institutionalized or—by the end of the novel—dead, though the exact chronology of her death is never explicitly stated. As such, the adult Susan rarely features in the novel. She mainly appears in Daniel’s memories as a little girl. This is an extension of how Daniel always sees his little sister. To him, she is always the innocent child whom he tried to protect from his parents’ persecution. Susan the adult cannot figure into Daniel’s story because a gulf appeared between them in their adult lives. He wants to preserve one of the few memories of his family as genuinely good and blameless. To Daniel, Susan is reduced to an artifact of his memory, a pure being in an impure world. He strives to maintain her purity in a narrative sense, even if the reality of their interactions occasionally intrudes on this conception view of the world.

Susan’s tragic death is difficult for Daniel to comprehend, which is shown through the vague chronology surrounding her death. While his trauma manifests as disillusionment with Protest and Performance and recurring patterns of enacting his Generational Trauma on his family, Susan copes by joining the movement their parents died for. The contrast between the siblings caused many arguments over their lives. They disagreed over whether they could assert political agency while living in a state that had already executed their parents. While Susan was optimistic that her movement could bring about change, she eventually lost faith in protest like her brother. Her suicide is a final attempt to assert agency over the sole property she felt she owned: her life. Susan’s depression and suicide speak to her tragic need to follow in her parent’s footsteps, a psychological death drive toward self-martyrdom. She grew up seeing her parents being idealized for their sacrifice to left-wing ideology. When her efforts to effect change in their honor fail, Susan martyrs herself in her parents’ image, joining them in the history of the political movement. The tragedy of her life is that she was never permitted to live on her own terms, only those of the state that killed her parents and—ultimately—killed her, too.

Daniel’s mother Rochelle is the ultimate pragmatist in the communist movement. In a world filled with academics and idealists, her hardheaded approach to the cause is rooted in her working-class experience. She loathes the world that has treated her and her family so poorly, so she looks to a future in which a more equitable distribution of wealth can be sought. To an academic like Daniel, this practical understanding of something as seemingly complex as an entire ideology is almost alien. Similarly, Rochelle is contrasted with her husband and other figures in the protest movement, men who spend their time arguing about Marxism and theory. In contrast, Rochelle’s desire for revolution is rooted in practicality. She wants to build a better world in defiance of the cynical self-interest which she observes in capitalist society. She disapproves of the selfishness and the vapidity of the status quo, so she seeks change. This desire for change is as natural to Rochelle as any other yearning, whether it be for food or sleep. After a working-class youth spent fighting for everything that she has, Rochelle regards communist revolution as just another necessity for which she must fight tooth and nail.

After her arrest, incarceration has a very different effect on Rochelle than her husband. Paul is horrified and disillusioned by his imprisonment and condemnation. Rochelle’s time in jail vindicates her cynicism and hardens her desire for change. She is unrelenting in her criticism of the state, which now wants to execute her for crimes that she may or may not have committed. Rochelle views her own death as the ultimate endorsement of her beliefs, deciding that any state that would seek to execute her must be dismantled at any cost. Rochelle is executed on the second attempt, and her raw determination to defy the state continues right up until the moment of her execution. She survives the electric chair on the first instance out of pure force of will, driven to survive by her contempt for the capitalist world.