Jesus' Son

In “Dundun,” the theme of Violence as Inevitability takes center stage. As with the death of Jack Hotel in the previous story, the death of McInnes is portrayed as random and unpreventable by the people involved due to Substance Use Disorder. McInnes is shot by Dundun by accident, and afterward, they crash the car on the way to the hospital. In addition, nobody wants to take responsibility for what happened, and in doing so, they portray the shooting as almost a natural disaster—simple bad luck.

Along with violence as inevitability, “Dundun” also demonstrates The Slipperiness of Time. When driving Dundun and McInnes to the hospital, McInnes suddenly dies; as they keep driving, F**khead describes the landscape he passes: “Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There’d been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings” (41). Unlike his earlier prescience, F**khead is now receiving a vision of the past—one that he similarly should have no access to. Just as his earlier vision presaged destruction, this vision points to evidence of past destruction—the glaciers crushed the region, a drought killed all the plants, and the dust hangs in the air. When McInnes dies, the landscape itself seems to reflect the loss of his life, as the narrator suddenly starts to notice all of the dead things that surround him, creating a bleak, desolate setting that reflects the staleness of life in the throes of substance use disorder.

Following F**khead’s revelation about the constancy of death and decay, he tells more about Dundun, writing that he “tortured Jack Hotel at the lake outside of Denver […] Later, Dundun beat a man almost to death with a tire iron right on the street in Austin, Texas, for which he’ll also someday have to answer, but now he is, I think, in the state prison in Colorado” (41). Just as decay, destruction, and entropy are inevitable, so are the violent actions of someone who’s only known violence. F**khead does not seem to expect or anticipate any sort of redemption for Dundun outside of punishment by the state, reflecting the motif of hopelessness. However, Johnson also complicates this picture by asserting that “there was kindness in his heart” (41). To F**khead’s mind, Dundun is as much a product of his environment as the glacier that crushed Iowa thousands of years ago: He’s destructive, but he also can’t change his nature. This also reflects how F**khead views himself—as someone perpetually under the influence and making mistakes that he cannot avoid, alleviating himself of any fault or blame. Additionally, F**khead speaking of the future in this story further bends the slipperiness of time and reflects the nonlinear, sometimes blurred memories of lives recalled after substance use disorder. F**khead’s happiness at McInnes death reflects a similar blurriness, but of emotion rather than time: He has watched a man die, but because of the turbulence of his emotions and his own history with McInnes, he can resist processing the horror of the situation by reminding himself of his worst memories of McInnes.