Leviathan (Auster novel) building accidentally went off. According to the forensic reports that have just been published, the man was killed instantly. His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and fragments of his corpse were found as far as fifty feet away from the site of the explosion. —"Leviathan" Through his own investigations, the narrator attempts to answer questions as to who the man was who blew himself up, why he was found with a homemade bomb, and what circumstances brought him to a violent end. "Leviathan" is borrowed from the biblical sea monster that Thomas Hobbes used as a metaphor for
Biblical criticism with the understanding that historical biblical criticism's focus on historicity produced a distinction between the meaning of what the text says and what it is about (what it references). This produced doubts about the text's veracity. The theologian Hans Frei writes that what he refers to as the "realistic narratives" of literature, including the Bible, don't allow for such separation. Subject matter is identical to verbal meaning and is found in plot and nowhere else. "As Frei puts it, scripture 'simultaneously depicts and renders the reality (if any) of what it talks about'; its subject matter is 'constituted by, or