Silence Themes

Shūsaku Endō’s Silence tells the harrowing story of a Portuguese missionary priest in 17th-century Japan named Father Rodrigues, who must decide to either let Japanese Christians suffer for his own sake, or to apostatize—that is, to symbolically renounce Christianity by placing one’s foot on a metal etching of Jesus Christ called a fumie. Although in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, apostasy is a betrayal of Jesus Christ (whom Christians regard…

Although Rodrigues makes his missionary voyage to Japan out of a self-sacrificing desire to serve Japanese Christians, his actions and thoughts betray a notable and damning pride and selfish attitude that is intertwined with his desire to serve. Rodrigues’s character reveals the arrogance often present within the proselytizing missionary and suggests that even the most seemingly devout people can also be self-serving to a fault. Through Rodrigues, Endō argues that such arrogance is a great…

Rodrigues and Garrpe believe that the Christian message is so potent and essential that the entire world should hear it, ultimately leading them to Japan. However, the priests are met with little success and much suffering, and by the end of the story, Rodrigues finds himself questioning whether there is any place for Christianity to exist inside of Japan. Though himself a Roman Catholic, Endō’s novel makes the controversial suggestion that Western Christianity is incompatible…

Rodrigues, a Portuguese priest illegally working in Japan, initially imagines that the Japanese persecute Christianity out of a sense of religious animosity or hatred—and must themselves be monstrous or evil people. But he discovers that the Japanese officials are ordinary men, the same as himself, and that their motivation for eradicating Christianity are primarily political. Through this realization, Endō suggests that religious persecution, though still brutal, may be as much a pragmatic issue as…