I just finished the book and was thinking about Benjamin/the hermit/Eleazar/etc. I was unfamiliar with the fable of the Wandering Jew and instead thought Benjamin was quite clearly implied to be Lazarus, but the ending of the book made me reconsider and do some research. I saw some debate about what might have happened to the hermit after the book ends but I think we are told exactly what happens to him! I haven’t seen anyone discuss this but the ending of the book is as follows:
‘The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. "Sic transit mundus," he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dirt out of them. The glow was engulfing a third of the heavens. He scratched his beard, took one last look at the ocean, then stepped back and closed the hatch.’
The description of the dusty sandals and the beard are features constantly ascribed to to the beggar throughout the book + the casual manner with which he treats the apocalypse (especially when surrounded by frantic monks) suggests someone who is perhaps less concerned with mortality than most.. but the part that convinced me that this ‘last monk’ is actually Benjamin is that in the legend, the wandering Jew is ‘cursed to walk the earth until the second coming of Christ’. Here we see the man literally stop walking the earth* *as he steps foot into a spaceship which we are told is leaving Earth to never return, just after the birth of Christ 2 (spooky edition).
In hindsight, there is a lot of evidence that the hermit is the wandering Jew, such as the quote
‘“I sense the predicament of the shoemaker
who tries to sell shoes in a village of shoemakers."
The hermit smiled.’
-in the fable, the wandering Jew was suggested to be a shoemaker/his taunting of Jesus was said to occur outside a shoemaker’s shop. It is also said that he ‘struck’ Jesus, and though I can’t find any evidence of what he struck him with, the hermit repeatedly strikes various characters with pebbles.
The hermit names himself ‘Eleazar’, which translates to ‘god has helped’- this seems unlikely for a character cursed by Christ to wander the earth for eternity, but it does tie into the novel (and especially the last third of the novel with the abbot and the irradiated woman and child) as a discussion of what it means for God to help, and the suffering that ‘help’ can cause. Especially since the story seems to end with a mass extinction of life on earth, including the mindlessly predatory shark, as the new child of God is reborn, and the world she inhabits is also reborn.
His description as the ‘last monk’ might also signify more than just ‘last monk on the spaceship’, as if he is finally able to become a follower of Christ (here: a monk) now that his curse has ended, and also he becomes the very ‘last’ follower since, you know, the world (as they know it) immediately ends after this scene.
Also- I am not a Latin speaker so do correct me here- the quote ‘sic transit mundus’ is an abbreviation of the quote ‘sic transit Gloria mundi’ which means ‘thus passes the glory of the world’. ‘Sic transit mundus’, though, translates to ‘thus passes the world’ or ‘thus goes away the world’. Obviously the apocalypse means the world itself will pass in a sense, but it could also be read as his parting from/ going away from the earth as he will no longer walk on it.
There was also another parable in the bible about a beggar called Lazarus who was covered in sores (a common descriptor of radiation poisoning, although not one that our Eleazar suffers from) and I think it more likely that Benjamin is a combination of the Wandering Jew and this Lazarus rather than Lazarus of Bethany. This is my theory about Benjamin, what do you guys think?
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