Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son: “Delayed Decoding” and Interpretation

ABSTRACT

This article explores a salient recurrent feature of the impressionist narrative style in the short-story cycle by Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (1992). First identified in the work of Joseph Conrad by the critic Ian Watt, “delayed decoding” is a method of recreating the immediacy of experience by recording the sense impressions registered by a focalizing consciousness while temporarily withholding an explanation for them. Johnson uses the device in an idiosyncratic way that adds resonance to his narrating character’s recollected experience. The article then invokes James Phelan’s rhetorical poetics to show how the narrator’s repudiation of the “regarding” (Phelan) narrative function of ethics or evaluation enables the text to delegate its own final (and necessarily tenuous) “decoding” to readerly inference from a mischievously enigmatic implied author.