A Canticle For Leibowitz

“He had never seen a ‘Fallout,’ and he hoped he’d never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends.”

Francis’s reaction to the sign in the fallout shelter is the first foreshadowing of the novel’s relationship with nuclear war. The monsters he refers to as Fallouts are people exposed to radiation, which then produces mutations in them. By referring to the legends of the Fallouts, Francis also creates doubts about what era he is living in. Nuclear weapons are a relatively modern invention but have already passed into legend in Francis’s time.

“There were things that were clearly natural, and there were things that were clearly supernatural, but between these extremes was a region of confusion (his own).”

Francis is confused when the abbot questions him about the old wanderer in the desert. Francis views the world from the perspective of faith, with empirical data on one side and supernatural, or faith-based, evidence on the other. He attributes the confusion between the two to a lack of his own wisdom rather than entertaining the idea that there may be questions that have no answers.

“They don’t think up questions like that on the basis of what might be true; they concoct the questions on the basis of what might be sensational if it just happened to be true.”

Father Cheroki counsels Francis regarding the novice’s doubts about his experience in the desert. The rumors started by the other monks are based on sensationalistic thinking. They are not asking questions as seekers of truth. Rather, they ask questions that they hope will provide entertaining answers.