godless Tone

Irreverent, Humorous, Cynical, Dash of Humility

Irreverent

In terms of tone, irreverent is one of the first words to come to our minds. Jason doesn't pull any punches. He says he'd like to be a nun because "you get to wear that cool thing on your head" (3.20), and when he does we understand that this is a guy who doesn't hold back out of respect for what others consider sacred.

Nope, Jason speaks his mind to everyone… and just about anywhere. At one TPO meeting he even asks, "'What does the pope care if some kid in St. Andrew Valley decides to worship dogs?'" As a reminder, a TPO meeting is a Catholic group… and the pope is a decidedly Catholic dude.

Yup. This book is filled with irreverence thanks to our narrator.

Humorous

Jason is funny. Just check this passage out:

I have the lawn one-quarter mowed when the mower sputters and coughs and dies. Diagnosis? Fuel crisis. Need gasoline. Call Kuwait. Raid an oil tanker. Drill a well. Or walk into the garage and grab the big red gas can off the shelf. (11.20-21)

Jason affects different voices, playing out various scenarios, like when he is Bock, J. Bock (you know, as in Bond, James Bond) (2.1-13). He pretends to be a ninja when he sneaks through the town at night. And when he has to walk a mile to the gas station to get fuel for the lawnmower, it becomes a trek of epic proportions:

I am walking with an empty red plastic container, with fifty miles of trackless desert waste between me and the Amoco oasis. […] Night comes and goes… I fight off a pack of insane meercats, I struggle blindly through a sandstorm. Hours later, parched and choking on Saharan grit, I spy the waving fronds of a date palm beyond the next rocky ridge…There it is, the artesian well. I plug a handful of shekels into its gaping slot and, with my last iota of energy, I punch the Mountain Dew button. (11.35-36)

While the humorous tone keeps things light, which is definitely appreciated given the loftiness of the questions godless tackles, it also shows us that our narrator has a flare for the dramatic—which is arguably how the reason he started a religion in the first place.

Cynical

Of course, another reason Jason started a religion is because he's become pretty cynical about the one he's been raised in. When he reflects on having been an altar boy he says, "that was back before I realized that it was mostly made up" (6.106); and later he tells he dad in regards to worshiping a water tower versus, say, Catholicism, "What's the difference? None of it's real anyway" (23.36). Yup—our boy's become pretty cynical.

He even refers to the Teen Power Outreach—TPO—as "a weekly brainwashing session," which are "just bunch of pointless yakking" (3.3, 9), with "a secret agenda to turn us all into monks and nuns, at least in terms of our relations with the opposite sex" (3.9). That's a pretty scathing review, isn't it? It seems like Jason is one done dude when it comes to Catholicism.
Dash of Humility

In hindsight Jason admits that he was "cocky, obnoxious, [and] insensitive" the day Henry slugs him (1.1). He's also aware that he may be wrong in his atheism. He says:

According to Father Haynes, if nonbeliever takes Holy Communion, he'll be damned for all eternity. Of course, being a nonbeliever damns me anyway, so I suppose it doesn't really matter, but I figure it's safer not to partake. Just in case I'm wrong about the whole God thing. (6.113)

Here we see a crack in the cynicism and irreverence Jason throws around for much of the book. This can be interpreted in more than one way, but we think this just might be because he's still a teen—and maybe, just a little bit, continues to hold onto some of the things he was raised with.