Adam Jeffson
The novel—on one level—is intentionally structured as something of futuristic allegorical retelling of the Biblical story of Job. The comparison is not entirely perfect; Job was the very image of a man who was pure of heart whereas Adam is most certainly not. He’s a murderer who was engaged to a woman who was a murderess. His reaction to the “sufferings” inflicted upon him are hardly coincident with the stoic acceptance and unwavering belief in the goodness of God. But then Adam’s lesser qualities as a man in comparison to his allegorical precedent is part of the entire point.
Eve I
Less overtly allegorical while paradoxically more symbolic, the novel also works on another Biblical level. An evangelical minister prophesies that an expedition to the North Pole is the same as attempting to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and that picking from that tree will result in the same kind of devastation that befell the Garden of Eden. Adam Jeffson becomes the only survivor of that expedition to the forbidden zone due to his fiancée, Clodagh, murdering the person standing in his way of getting on board. Thus she is the symbol of the original Eve whose temptation allows Adam to bite from that forbidden fruit.
Eve II
On that other non-Job level, the story conceives an idea of what might happen given humans the opportunity to have yet another shot at starting all over again. In this conception, Adam’s symbolic situation is made manifest by his name and how Eve I made it possible for him to survive the apocalypse. When he later meets a young woman who has also survived—whom he first names Clodagh and then Leda—it becomes patently clear by the end that her symbolic status is the name she always wanted to be called by in the first place: Eve II.
The White
The story of Job in the Bible is framed as a bet between God and Satan over the soul of the most pious man on earth. As indicated, Adam Jeffson is hardly the most pious man on earth, but then the world is much changed from the days talked about in the Bible. Suffice to say that Adam Jeffson is a creature of his time; a time when the purities of blood of the characters in the Bible have been contaminated. The White is the symbolic of God in this story. That The White is also not exactly pure in motivation is a reminder that God who is truly all-good would likely not engage in a wager over the depth of piety either.
The Black
The Black is symbolic of Satan in the story of Job with the reminder that ultimately the wager with God produced not an evil result, but an affirmation of God’s trust and—to a minor degree, at any rate—His goodness. In much the same way, though The Black is unquestionably the negative counterpoint to the goodness of The White, it can be argued that the effect and consequences of The Black upon Jeffson are not entirely negative just as The White is not entirely positive. This perspective, however, may be entirely objective since everything that the reader knows about the White and the Black arrive via the pen of Jeffson’s notorious unreliability as a narrator.
