See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

In ancient Greek theater, like Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, dramatic irony was central. Audiences knew Oedipus’s fate while he remained ignorant. This technique was carried into Roman drama, like Seneca’s tragedies. As described earlier, Christian writers moved away from irony in the late antique period.

During the Renaissance, Shakespeare used dramatic irony heavily. In Romeo and Juliet, the audience knows Juliet’s “death” is staged, but Romeo doesn’t. Such irony remained common in 17th- and 18th-century European drama, as in Molière’s comedies, but less structurally central than in Greek tragedy. The 19th century saw it in melodrama and novels (e.g., Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles), where readers grasped fates characters couldn’t.

In the 20th century, dramatic irony shifted. Modernist works like Brecht’s epic theater used it deliberately to alienate audiences, encouraging critical reflection. O’Neill’s plays (Long Day’s Journey into Night) leaned on it for emotional weight.

The Gospel of Mark seems to anticipate literary modernism. Mark didn’t invent stream of consciousness or set his gospel in a world of urban alienation. But the instincts of modernist storytelling – deliberate ambiguity, refusal to explain, the layering of voices, the elevation of reader above character, the fragmentary sense of time – are already alive in Mark. They are what make the gospel feel so strange to readers trained on the smoother harmonies of Matthew and Luke. In literary style, Mark seems to reach both far back, to the ancient Greeks, and far ahead, to modernism. He writes more as dramatist than as evangelist, putting him in unexpected company.

Withheld Meaning: Proust’s Readers and Mark’s

Modernist literature often refuses to say what it means. It circles themes without resolving them. It trusts the reader to infer. Mark gives riddles disguised as parables, miracles that aren’t explained, and a resurrection that isn’t shown. Not glory, but silence.

In Swann’s Way, Proust captures this same dynamic, not in plot, but in psychological structure. Swann, obsessively reading the behavior of the woman he loves, becomes a figure of frustrated interpretation:

“He belonged to that class of men who… are capable of discovering in the most insignificant action a symbol, a menace, a piece of evidence, and who are no more capable of not interpreting a movement of the person they love than a believer is of not interpreting a miracle.”

There’s the reader Mark aimed for, watching every detail, looking for signs.

Beckett and the Failed Witness

Beckett’s characters, like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot and Winnie in Happy Days are excluded from understanding. They wait for voices that don’t explain, and they continue despite knowing the endpoint will never come.

Vladimir (Waiting for Godot): Suppose we repented.

Estragon: Repented what?

Vladimir: Oh… (He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details.

Estragon: Our being born?

In Mark, the reader continues after the characters collapse. The women flee the tomb. The disciples abandon the frame. The gospel stops, but the reader continues – because Mark has structured the story so that you see what they don’t.

Beckett once said that Joyce was always adding to his prose, and that he himself was working in the opposite direction: “I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away.”

Mark takes away. He subtracts resurrection appearances and erases resolution. What remains is a void that insists on meaning – not through declaration, but through the reader’s isolation.

Unreliable Perception and Faulkner’s Disciples

In Faulkner’s works like The Sound and the Fury, characters narrate their experiences through fragmented, subjective lenses, often unaware of the full scope of their stories. Their voices – Quentin Compson’s anguished stream-of-consciousness or Addie Bundren’s posthumous reflections – clash and contradict, leaving gaps that the reader must navigate. This aligns with reader-response criticism, which emphasizes the reader’s active role in interpreting and reconstructing meaning from incomplete or biased accounts. Faulkner’s narrators don’t deliver a tidy “truth”; they offer perspectives clouded by personal trauma, guilt, or limited understanding. Quentin, for instance, obsesses over time and his sister Caddy’s fall, but his mental collapse distorts his narrative, forcing the reader to piece together the Compson family’s decay from his fractured memories and those of his brothers.

Faulkner’s unreliable narrators force the reader to rise above their limitations, synthesizing disparate voices to uncover a truth that no single character fully grasps.

Mark gives us the same through the disciples. They speak, but they are not to be trusted. They fear Jesus’s passion predictions and change the subject. And unlike Luke, Mark never rehabilitates them.

As with Faulkner, their unreliability is device. Mark lets them fall so you can rise, just as Faulkner allows Quentin’s breakdown to weave time, memory, and guilt into the fabric of the narrative. Faulkner’s chaos of competing voices reflects the human condition – fragmented, subjective, and burdened by history. In Mark, the disciples’ failures underscore the radical nature of Jesus’s mission, which defies human expectations of power and glory.

Beckett on the Death of the Subject

Samuel Beckett, writing on Proust in 1931, described the modern condition as a crisis, not of plot, but of self:

“We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday… The subject has died – and perhaps many times – on the way.”

This is the shape of Mark’s gospel. The narrator sees all but explains nothing. The disciples begin as named voices and end as absences. The final scene gives no resolution. Time, once galloping forward with Mark’s “immediately” at every step, halts in a tomb that no one enters.

The reader is left standing outside the story with a question its characters cannot answer.

Gospel of Ellipsis: Hemingway’s Surface Tension

Hemingway’s prose derives its emotional power from deliberate restraint, a technique often described as the “iceberg theory,” where the bulk of meaning lies beneath the surface of the text. In stories like Hills Like White Elephants, he employs sparse, minimalist dialogue and understated narration to convey profound emotional and thematic weight without explicitly stating the core issues. The story’s central conflict – an implied discussion about abortion between a man and a woman at a train station – is never directly named. Instead, Hemingway embeds the tension in clipped exchanges, pregnant pauses, and subtle imagery.

This restraint amplifies the emotional force by forcing readers to engage actively with the subtext. The silences between sentences – where characters avoid articulating their fears, desires, or regrets – carry the weight of unspoken truths. For example, when Jig says, “They look like white elephants,” and the man responds dismissively, the dialogue skirts the real issue, revealing their emotional disconnect and the power imbalance in their relationship. The unsaid looms larger than the said, making the reader feel the characters’ anxiety, uncertainty, and isolation.

Mark doesn’t explain the fig tree or narrate the resurrection. He doesn’t say why the women told no one. And when Jesus speaks cryptically, the narrator does not clarify. Mark doesn’t mismanage meaning, he suppresses it for effect. Like Hemingway, Mark trusts the reader to feel the weight of what isn’t said.

Kafka’s Gospel: Parable Without Answer

Kafka’s stories are often structured as parables – but not the kind that end in moral resolution. His parables frustrate the interpretive impulse. Their logic seems to point to something just beyond reach.

In Before the Law, a man spends his life trying to gain access to a door that was meant only for him. He dies without ever passing through. The priest in The Trial tells Joseph K. the parable – and then refuses to explain it.

In Mark 13:14, Jesus warns of an “abomination of desolation” and then stops mid-sentence. The narrator breaks in: “Let the reader understand.” Who is this reader? Not Peter, James, or John. You. Understand what? Mark’s narrator refuses to explain it.

Like Kafka, Mark knows the parable won’t resolve. He knows it exists to sharpen the hunger to understand. And the gospel itself becomes that hunger’s object.

Conclusion – Mark’s Gospel Came Too Soon

Even sympathetic readers struggle to see it. Because Mark says less the other gospels say, it is nearly impossible to read him without filling in what he left out. Harmonization is a habit learned in childhood. An untrained, unbiased, innocent reading – a first reading – by a western reader is almost unavailable. And so the masterpiece goes unnoticed because the broader story has been too thoroughly absorbed for the real Mark to be seen.

By theological or historical standards, Mark has long ranked lowest by far among the gospel writers. In early Christian citation, he accounts for barely 4% of gospel references. He is by far the shortest and the roughest, some say the least theologically rich. I disagree.

By modern literary standards – those that distrust omniscient narration and place the burden of meaning on the reader – Mark might be the rhetorical master of millennia.

That achievement is easily missed. I think it a shame that readers of modern literature rarely turn to the gospels, starting with Mark. And if they do, prior convictions prevent them from imagining it could house a work this strange, this far ahead of its time. Mark wasn’t experimenting with form for its own sake. He was a storyteller – one whose narrative instincts ran far ahead of his genre.

In his world of early Christianity, stories were expected to explain, miracles to prove, and heroes to be understood. Mark resists all of that. He gives us a Messiah who is misunderstood, a story that ends in silence, and a text that refuses to explain itself.

In other words, he wrote a modernist gospel – a work of quiet fire – before modernism existed.

Postscript: The Gospel That Leaves You Standing

Mark ends with absence– with flight, silence, and a rolled-away stone. That was the final move of a writer who trusted you to finish what he started.

Across this series, I haven’t treated Mark as theology but as what it so clearly is, once you stop trying to fix it: a story designed to be misunderstood by its characters and grasped by its reader. None of that should bear on your theology, beliefs, or lack thereof; it works regardless.

That story does not yield its truth by accumulating facts. It yields by withholding enough to make you reach. And when you do, something happens. You see what others miss. You feel the silence grow louder than the speech.

Even now, twenty centuries later, the final question still hangs–not in the mouths of the women at the tomb, but in yours: What are you going to do with what you’ve seen?