A careful reading [of The Time of Your Life] shows that Joe [the play's central character] may be seen as a valid Christ-figure—not a literal Christ, for The Time of Your Life is no Second Coming, nor even an allegorical Christ, but a type of Christ, essentially realistic and certainly very human—whose nature and behavior are completely consonant and who takes on stature as heroic protagonist within such a mode. Whether Saroyan consciously created Joe as Christ-figure is immaterial; this is the character which emerges and which the script projects—by allusion, by indirect revelation, by implicit scriptural parallel in Joe's motivations and the shape of his life, and by specific episodes whose relevance to the meaning of the play is carried by their symbolic content. (pp. 228-29)

Although, as with Christ, the facts of Joe's past essentially comprise a lacuna in his life up to...