Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 959

Two broken-down actors—Zuss is a large, red-faced, and dignified man, and Nickles is sarcastic and gaunt to the point of grotesqueness—are drawn into a drama involving J. B., a character who resembles Job. The book of Job is the Old Testament story of a good man who is punished so that God can prove to Satan, his adversary, that there are good people who love God despite their hardships. Unlike Satan in the book of Job, Nickles seems to sympathize with humanity and denounce God for torturing innocent people. It would be Job’s demand for reasons, for justice, that would force him to confront God.

Download J. B. Study Guide

Subscribe Now

In a bedraggled circus sideshow, Zuss (whose attitude reinforces his self-image of what God would be like) and Nickles (who is disillusioned and bitter because this play had been done over and over throughout the centuries, with the same actions and ending) argue over Heaven and Hell as they watch modern Job (J. B.) and his happy family. Nickles mocks Zuss’s sincerity, and Zuss declares that God has reasons for testing Job (who represents humanity). Nickles tends to see himself as Job as he claims that God is jealous because Job has a soul and intellect that allows him to question God’s actions. As Nickles chants, “If God is God He is not good, If God is good He is not God.”

Zuss recalls World War II and its horrors to reveal that someone is always playing Job, punished “for walking round the world in the wrong skin.” Modern Jobs are no longer perfect, as Job is described; rather, they are average people trying to survive in an unfriendly universe. Hell is not only suffering, however. According to Nickles, Hell is Job’s consciousness of consciousness—knowing that he will continue to love God even though he is destroyed and loses his wealth, his children, and everything else.

J. B. is a complacent, successful New Englander in his thirties, with children appropriately named David (age thirteen), Mary (age twelve), Jonathan (age ten), Ruth (age eight), and Rebecca (age six). His wife, Sarah, warns Job not to trust in their “luck” or success. It is Sarah who is devoted to God and Sarah who insists that they give proper thanks to God. She says that justice demands that God punish as well as reward, but J. B. refuses to listen. He trusts that God’s gift, symbolized in the greening of the leaves, will never be removed. Nickles and Zuss plot his destruction.

In succession, two messengers in the roles of soldiers, newspapermen, and police officers meet with Job and Sarah to announce the horrifying deaths of their children: first David, shot by his own men after the war ends; then Mary and Jonathan, slammed into a brick wall in a car wreck; Rebecca, raped and killed by a nineteen-year-old; and finally Ruth, crushed beneath a falling wall in their bombed-out city. In every case, the second messenger declares, like his biblical counterpart, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” This messenger also suggests that some are doomed to witness the destruction and the losses of other people—witnesses, too, suffer.

After every revelation, Sarah weeps and withdraws, while Job continues to believe in God and his goodness. He also calls out to the silence as he seeks an answer to humanity’s eternal question—why does God permit the suffering of innocent people? Meanwhile, as J. B. and Sarah sit in the rubble of their home, Nickles sarcastically mocks Zuss for his bad aim—he destroyed an entire city to “blister one man’s skin.”

For J. B., the meaninglessness of his...