Joe Hackett

Joe Hackett serves as the novel’s protagonist. Wheat is a limited omniscient novel. It is Joe’s perceptions, his assumptions, and his biases that control the account of the novel’s events. Joe Hackett can be a difficult character for contemporary readers to entirely embrace given the contemporary cultural drift from affirming a viable spiritual dimension. Joe Hackett wants to be a saint. Contemporary readers can be leery of such grandiose ambitions. In ways that few other contemporary fictional characters do, Joe Hackett yearns. From an early age, he cannot accept that the material world is the entirety of the cosmos. In the seminary, he affirms so absolutely that an individual must be more than dust and lust and that the construct of the universe itself sustained a grand spiritual reality that he alienates the other seminarians, who mock his spirituality as egotism.

His commitment to...