Engaging with God and Sustaining Faith: Analyzing Will Eisner’s "A Contract with God"

Edited by Dora Skënderi

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss Will Eisner’s 1978 graphic novel A Contract with God alongside the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to explore maintaining faith in the face of absurd loss. First, I will compare and contrast the story of Abraham and Isaac with Frimme Hersh’s story in A Contract with God. Borrowing from Kevin Hoffman’s interpretation of Fear and Trembling in his paper “Facing Threats to Earthly Felicity: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling,” I argue that both stories are about maintaining faith in the face of loss. I will then interpret each character’s relationship with the divine using Martin Buber’s framework of I-Thou and I-It relationships. I argue that Abraham remains in faith because he confronts God as Thou, while Hersh gives up on faith because he fails to enter into an unmediated relationship with God. Finally, I will discuss the significance of faith as something that gives meaning to absurd events. I conclude that there is still value to maintaining faith through loss, because a relationship to the divine gives meaning to otherwise meaningless events.