Knights of Faith: Christian Existentialism in Colin McDougall’s Execution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Colin McDougall’s only novel, Execution , is bookended by two senseless executions. The first execution prompts an existential crisis for the characters involved. The second, paradoxically, somehow atones for the first and moral order is restored. McDougall's allusions to existentialists like Franz Kafka seem to indicate that he wished Execution to be read within the tradition of existential fiction. The novel's ending, however, which features a proxy crucifixion, complicates this interpretation since novels within that tradition do not typically allow for any kind of spiritual transcendence. Understanding this seemingly irreconcilable tension means eschewing the dominant form of mid-century existentialism characterized by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in favour of one of existentialism's foundational figures. A close reading of Execution , considering the formative texts of existentialism and a comparative reading of works by its international influences, reveals a valuable theoretical matrix for parsing the difficult philosophy of this neglected novel. For Execution accords with an earlier form of existentialism, one that predates the school's consensus atheism and is articulated primarily by Soren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".