SOURCE: Fredrickson, Robert S. “Robert Stone's Opium of the People: Religious Ambivalence in Damascus Gate.” Papers on Language and Literature 36, no. 1 (winter 2000): 42-57.

In the following essay, Fredrickson examines Stone's religious preoccupations and spiritually bereft protagonists in Damascus Gate, as they represent a reprise and elaboration of Stone's theological speculations and portraits of alienated leftists in previous novels.

That Robert Stone has written another novel, Damascus Gate, with a central figure resembling those drugged and detached men of his earlier work leads us to ponder why he repeatedly so situates his readers in relation to his stories. Christopher Lucas, like Holliwell (A Flag for Sunrise) and Converse (Dog Soldiers), is another marginal, uncommitted, self loathing sot, another of those who “pretended to be human but were not” (DG [Damascus Gate] 326). These characters stand forever on the periphery of political or religious commitment, alternately belittling those who are involved...