The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.

Published 2021 · 472 pages · 121,164 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · History, Literary Fiction

How hard is The Prophets to read?

The Prophets scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Jones writes in lyrical, emotionally intense prose that incorporates the vocabulary of plantation life and Black vernacular. The language is demanding in its poetic density, with passages that approach incantation.
Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
Sentences are often long and rhythmic, building through accumulated imagery and emotional charge. Jones's prose has the texture of song and sermon, creating sustained passages of lyric intensity.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
The novel explores love, freedom, and what the plantation system does to human relationships through Samuel and Isaiah's bond. Their love becomes both refuge and target, with other enslaved people becoming instruments of their destruction.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Antebellum Mississippi, the psychology of enslavement, and the textures of plantation life layer through the narrative. Jones builds his world through accumulated attention to bodies, labor, and the small spaces where love persists.
Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
Multiple perspectives reveal how different people on the plantation understand Samuel and Isaiah's relationship. The reader must track how the community fractures around them while understanding the forces that make some people complicit in their destruction.
Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
The barn becomes symbolic of sanctuary that can't last. The prophets become symbolic of those who see differently and suffer for it. The river becomes symbolic of freedom imagined and forever deferred.
Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
Jones writes with passionate proximity to his lovers' bond, without ironic distance from their love. The novel is tender about queer Black history while unflinching about the violence that surrounded it.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
The violence arrives as it must; the love persists in memory. Jones offers the tragedy without the comfort of escape, honoring what was destroyed.
Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
Multiple perspectives across different time periods complicate the structure. The form is demanding but serves to show how the community's response to love reflects the plantation's larger deformations.

How The Prophets is regarded

The Prophets holds a literary regard score of 49 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Prophets sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (212 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Prophets scores 82 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic (with mythic return)
They were not oxen, but they moved and the people watched.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
A snake. A snake eating its own damn tail.
Mythos: Irony vi (Visio malefica) (irony vi)
Twin backs juicy with the marks left by whips and disapproving gazes.
Genre: Romance + Novel
The darkness before him wasn’t still. It convulsed like a living thing with seven tentacles, attached to figures maybe, twin darknesses.

Where the story of The Prophets takes place

  • Elizabeth Plantation ('Empty'), Yazoo country near Vicksburg, Mississippi, c. 1834-1838 (1834 to 1838), the main setting
  • Kosongo village and the slave ship, West-Central Africa and the Atlantic, Portuguese contact era (1480 to 1600)
  • The Seven's dark, a timeless ancestral chorus addressing the reader

5 things that are true of The Prophets, with the passage for each

  1. The book opens with a chorus of ancestors who identify themselves as speaking in seven voices.

    We who are from the dark, speaking in the seven voices.

  2. Amos first approaches Paul by suggesting that enslaved people need Jesus too.

    Maybe us niggers need Jesus, too?

  3. Samuel kills Timothy Halifax with an ax in Timothy's bedroom.

    Samuel reached behind his back, snatched the ax from its hiding place, and with one quick swipe, he put it deep into Timothy’s temple.

  4. Maggie kills Paul with a knife to the back of his neck during Samuel's burning.

    The tip of the knife met Paul at the back of his neck and slid through much more quietly than she had expected.

  5. Samuel does not die as a body; he turns into fireflies or embers in the woods.

    The last sound was fluttering. Samuel burst into fireflies.

Scenes in The Prophets that Frye would name

68 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
James doused Samuel with the oil and then held a torch against his leg. The flames raced up his body. Samuel's hanging and burning is the book's central sacrificial death.
Epos, untitled
We who are from the dark, speaking in the seven voices. The ancestral chorus speaks as an oral, communal voice.
Anagnorisis, untitled
“That was you?” he said, his voice quivering when it finally formed words. Isaiah learns Amos was the man who carried him from the wagon.
Sparagmos, untitled
The wild men fight over the best pieces to take home. Isaiah's vision of the lynching ends in dismemberment.
Pharmakos, untitled
Twin backs juicy with the marks left by whips and disapproving gazes. The lovers are made the community's scapegoat.
Masque, untitled
Elewa and Kosii took deep, simultaneous breaths, and then they leaped, clearing all four sticks. The Kosongo bonding ceremony as pageant.

Books that share these scenes with The Prophets

About the author

Robert Jones Jr., Robert Jones