The Prodigal Son

We tend to visualise a story when we think of the parable. We see the father, the jealous older brother and the prodigal son who returns from his unfortunate journey across the outer world. We see a story based on the images, a game that is played between two players, forgetting the brother, and we have the morality of the tale, which is not its ethic.

Let’s forget the moral in order to challenge the story. Taking one step further the challenge to our naïve realism of persisting in seeing literal meaning or unequivocal explanations for everything set before our eyes, we should ask ourselves whether the parable really contains a story, if the prodigal son has ever left the house of his father. How could we read it if the parable spoke about the dreams, wishes and fantasies of its own characters?

The father, not loving equally all his sons, looks for a pretext to legitimate his preference. The eldest son suffers from nightmares whereby his father’s choices are revealed to him. The youngest son fears, on his turn, losing his freedom by having to return to the place that he never left.

If we move one step further and reduce all characters to a single one, father and sons within the same person in the image of a disjointed trinity, we will have some unspeakable entity who commands us through a whisper so low that no one else can hear: “go, and bring experience back to me”, and we go, wrapped in the warmest of orders, not even conscious of having abandoned our primeval home. What really matters, then, is to know which instance of ourselves has sent us and which part of our experience is worth to be turned into a story.