What Comes After

Content Warning: This section contains references to domestic violence, sexual assault, death by suicide, murder, and animal death.

What Comes After presents silence as multifaceted and powerful. Isaac insists on silent reflection both when he attends Quaker meetings and when he makes important decisions. However, he acknowledges that his silence can be a weapon against those he loves—a weapon that allows him to feel superior in his calm while passively harming those who care for him. Jonah feels calm only when at meetings, where he can sit in silence and allow himself to exist. The many questions that hang in the air between characters (but are rarely voiced) further demonstrate the power of silence and the power of breaking a silence.

Silence is a primary tenet of Quaker worship. Meetings are silent unless a member is moved by the spirit of the Divine to speak. Isaac embraces this silence beyond meetings and uses it as a tool to manage his emotions and insist on space for decision-making. However, his reliance on silence is complicated because he speaks more often at meetings than anyone else and reveals in the process of his clearness committee meetings that he isn’t really moved by any Divine force. He learned silence from his father, but the intimacy that silence offered was broken when his father touched him. Isaac acknowledges that his silence can be a “withholding” and that it led to conflicts with his father, wife, and son. He even says that “certain silences c[an] be sharpened into long, fine needles and slid with little effort into a beloved’s ender places” and explains that the silence itself provides a hiding place for the wielder of that weapon (207).

The contrast to Isaac’s use of silence as a protective isolating force, and a weapon, is Jonah’s experience of calm and reflection at Quaker meetings. He says, “All that quiet calmed me” (37), and, “[I]n meeting, there were no monsters, no dad, nothing pounding at the outside of me. Just peace” (264). Silence thus made Jonah feel free from his potential violence, and he argues in his early chapters that had he kept going to meetings, he wouldn’t have killed Daniel. This argument demonstrates the power of silence to stop violence or redirect violent urges. While Isaac uses silence as a protective force to prevent intrusion, Jonah used silence to hear his soul and hear the good things in the world without interference from trauma or violence.

The novel’s focus on silence continues in the unspoken truths between the characters. Peter doesn’t lie about hiring sex workers and cheating on his wife; he just doesn’t mention it. Until the novel’s climax, Isaac and Lorrie never directly talk about Daniel or Jonah, avoiding the topic that hangs in the silence between them. The novel’s climactic moments that happen in the present (Lorrie and Isaac discussing her burning Jonah’s clothes, Isaac asking about the father of the baby, Evangeline insisting that Isaac work things out with Lorrie) are all about breaking the silence to say things that have gone unsaid. Every time, the air is clearer, and relationships grow stronger and more intimate. However, the most intense relationships remain silent: Evangeline never explains to Isaac her love for Jonah or how Daniel raped her. Lorrie and Isaac never really talk about their shared grief. Only Peter releases his silence entirely, and though he receives forgiveness and understanding, his marriage is over, he loses his job, and his reputation is ruined. The novel presents silence as ambiguously as it does the characters.