Jason's disconnection from the real world

The cover of Hey Nostradamus! depicts a silhouette of someone who is kneeling in the act of prayer. I believe that this person symbolizes the person that Jason became after the school massacre.

Primarily, it is common that when people pray, they look up towards god or heaven. However, the person’s head on the cover is looking down, away from heaven. This represents Jason and his view on faith, as he has turned away from religion and his own beliefs. He gave up on his beliefs after the school massacre, when the people he cared about most turned their backs on him. In Jason’s section of the book, he is often cynical about religion and turns his head away from it by doubting his faith. For instance, as Douglas Coupland ends Jason’s part of the book, Jason examines the universe when he says that “the universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am on a sunny August morning with chilled black ink pumping though my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing on earth” (146). Jason feels insignificant and detached from the world and, in turn, he is detached from his faith.

Secondly, the person on the cover is kneeling. I believe that this is a representation of Jason and how he has given up or surrendered to where he is in life. He is not working at a job that he enjoys and is not doing anything to move forward in life. When Jason writes to his clone, he warns him not to “screw up your life the way that I did” (93). Jason has surrendered and accepted the fact that he has failed in life. Jason has also given up on his family, namely, the relationship that he has with his father. Following the massacre, he lost all contact with his own father and had given up on trying to level with his father’s opinions. Throughout the book, Jason cynically speaks about his father, portraying his father’s thoughts in an evil way. When he analyzes himself and his sins, he realizes that “it’s religion all over again; it’s [his] father’s corrosive bile percolating through my soil and tickling my taproot… we’re all slime in the eyes of God” (87). Jason pessimistically speaks about his father’s opinions, without attempting to understand them. He surrenders to the fact that he never will never understand why his father acts this way.

Lastly, the cover’s silhouette has a head which is disconnected from it’s body. In the novel, Jason’s character starts to distance and disconnect his mind from his body. I believe that the body represents Jason in physical nature which is a metaphor for the real world. At the same time, the head represents Jason as a person. Together, this separation between the head and the body resembles Jason’s separation from the world. This is portrayed in the novel when Jason decides to experiment with drugs. I believe that Jason does this as an escape, in order to disconnect himself from all of his memories about Cheryl, the massacre and his father that are in the real world. These are the thoughts which have been haunting his mind for too long. At the same time, Jason’s job as a home renovator shows disconnection between his mind and body. Jason has a creative mind and he has many eccentric thoughts and opinions about life. This is a mind that is not fitted for the job that his body does.