This novel's name is from a Velvet Underground song called "Heroin," where the singer says that when heroin hits his blood stream he "feels just like Jesus' son," which is a loaded statement. On the positive side, the words mean, "When I am high, I feel at peace, I feel divine and important." But on the negative side, the words mean, "Jesus was supposed to be holy, but what if he wasn't? What if he had a bunch of children with random women?" The point is that the words signify the dual nature of addiction: peace and shame, mixed together.
The peace is what keeps the character moving forward, but as the problem of addiction grows, the characters in the novel begin to succumb to the true horror of their situation. They begin to notice that at their age, it is unrealistic that they will ever be free from addiction, and it is clear that their bodies are literally deteriorating. Many of them have warrants, so they would never dare to go to a hospital, because many have serious criminal records. Therefore, slowly, they realize that they will probably die on the streets in the winter cold.
Trauma and tragedy are the brutal reality for addicts. True isolation and loneliness, and hopelessness, all plague the people in this book. But Denis Johnson's main argument is not that addicts are evil. As the title implies, Johnson believes the characters are holy, like Jesus. He believes that their stories are the broken, tragic stories of not only them, but all of us who struggle on this earth, because no man is free from addiction.
Also, the shame that the characters carry is completely unreasonable. We didn't evolve to handle heroin in our blood, so the people who try it, not knowing how truly powerful it is as a drug, end up addicted—not because they are weak or evil, but because the drug is so unreasonably effective that no one can imagine how good it feels until they try it, and without the foresight to see the future, the addiction spirals.
After time, their bodies literally depend on the substances, so they are obligated to break the law in order to survive, because (especially older addicts) could literally seize and die without their addiction being met. That is a serious legal issue that we don't take seriously enough as a society. Johnson's book is designed to show young addicts what the future really looks like unless they start learning to be autonomous and develop self-control.
