Our narrator, Jonah, seems destined for the people he meets and the places he goes. This closely intermingles with his belief in Bokononism. While Bokonon floated around on a boat waiting for a storm to take him to his imminent future in San Lorenzo, Jonah is pushed to his destiny with the Hoenikker family and San Lorenzo. When I first learned that Jonah was a follower of this strange religion called Bokononism, I wondered why somebody would be attracted to such a small, unheard of religion. Did his immediate preoccupation with Bokonon’s ideals stem from the coincidences that occurred in Ilium and those that brought him to be on the same plane with two of the Hoenikkers? Or perhaps, Jonah was attracted to Bokononism on his own accord, and only after he became a Bokononist was he able to recognize these bizarre coincidences in terms of Bokononism.
Personally, I believe it is the former. The magazine that sent him to San Lorenzo, all of the interrelated people he ran into in Ilium, seeing his own name on the stone angel... these occurrences are sure to make anybody wonder about their destiny. Jonah was “ripe for Bokononism”(54) and the primary belief that certain things are “‘supposed’ to happen”(84). He had already experienced the fact that people are related far beyond just a superficial level, but now he is handed a document that gives a name for this phenomenon (karass) and a belief system behind it. It was inevitable that Jonah would relate so quickly to Bokononism given the incidents he had just lived through, and I am anxious to see if this newfound awareness changes his destiny or his interactions with his karass.
I found it intriguing that you mention the possibility of the narrator's "awareness" could potentially "change his destiny or interactions with his karass," especially given the nature of destiny as an abstact concept of predestination. When we think of destiny, we tend to think of it as forces beyond our control that determine the course of our lives. But by bringing up the topic of awareness, you've approached it from a new perspective. After all, the awareness of destiny would mean the acceptance of a new personal reality, one that is not determined by our perceptions, processes, and interpretations, but one that is, in a way, assigned to us. And if the narrator is aware of that, if he accepts the terms of an assigned reality, then perhaps that would set him apart from other people who believe that they are actively designing their own realities. This distancing is mirrored on another, more literal level by the lengths to which the narrator goes to create a kind of separation between himself, the reader, and the events of the book, such as the use of metatextuality and his paradoxical "Nothing in this book is true"/"The book was to be factual" debate. It will certainly be interesting to follow the development of this awareness and the effect it has on the narrator, both in his role as a character and in his role as a messenger.
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