Against the Author: The Child’s Eye View as Existential Resistance

1.0 Authorial Omniscience and the Illusion of Unity

Your Bishop, Monsieur Hugo, is sublime. But he is also, in the final analysis, a theological fiction: a proxy for the Author-God, who sees all and reconciles all. You call it “transcendent”; I call it closure—a comforting illusion that denies the existential condition of man: abandonment.

The so-called “God’s-eye view” is not the highest perspective—it is the least human. It assumes resolution, meaning, and purpose. But we are not born into coherence. We are thrown, without instruction, into a world not of our choosing. We do not begin as bishops. We begin as children.

2.0 The Child’s Eye: The Most Human of Views

The child’s-eye view is not abstract like the bird’s, nor experienced like the worm’s. It is pre-reflective, disoriented, painfully attentive. It sees without knowing, perceives without judging. It is not yet reconciled.

This is the most authentic vision of the human condition. It refuses to reduce reality to system or to salvation. The child, staring at injustice, does not excuse it with grace or law. The child says, this should not be.

Where the Bishop of Digne forgives, and Javert condemns, the child questions. And that questioning—raw, unresolved—is the origin of freedom.