The narrator is a self-proclaimed redactor freed from the constraints of asserting reliability. Historical interpretation of fact is portrayed as undependable in the new order. Set in the abyss of post apocalyptical end-time, each individual's story petitions a way out of the void through a new genre, a thematic arrangement of fact, an acknowledgement of the process of selectivity.

Two highly contradictory modes of organisation inform this work. Although the intellectual call to a new order is supported by the novel's fragmentary structure, the substantial usage of biblical references somewhat undermines the work's originality. It is no accident that Joycean motifs resonate in this call for an inquest into the protocol and orchestration of the word. The authorization for a rewrite seems to come from both God and Joyce. The wrath of the misrepresented is the palpable force that guides this work. Jesus the historical celebrity sanctions this force. He beseeches the reader to recognize his imperfections, to excavate his humanity buried and bowed beneath twenty centuries of distortion culminating in the final blasphemy of the rubric text. Escape is both crafted and expedited through the new technological language of the computer.

Each of the main male characters have been re-christened with names that expose their marginalization. Bricks are heavy, associated with density, dullness, confined by and made up of the terrestrial. Brick, looking up, suggests a longing for being other than it is, for lightness and luminosity. The name of the book suggests the potential for emancipation, the possibility of escape.

Wired (extracted from Wendel) suggests that we are in the presence of a vivid and frustrated current. He spends his intensity in the building and fusing of practical objects. Xed is spelled like a cancellation as in X'ed or crossed out and pronounced like the last letter in the alphabet. His status as hero athlete has been revoked by virtue of his accident. These given names were too mainstream and inclusive to define their roles and so were withdrawn from the text as obsolete.

The computer, although nameless, is the personality that confers authority and provides focus when words fail the nominal authors of text. In effect, it is the new amanuensis of the redactor, as yet unestablished and ignorant of its power. Redactive authority is illustrated through the ascension of the power of the amanuensis to interpret the text. The impossibility of ascertaining historical 'truth' is suggested in the overlaying of personal agenda and interpretation onto text. The computer's helpmeet status is analogous to the redactor's prior unconscious state, "along for the ride, as usual, uninvited, my presence assumed", before advancing "through the stages of self-awareness: scribe, reporter, editor, assassin."

Artifice and mistrust of words resonate throughout the novel. The first glimpse of this motif appears in the redactor/narrator's assessment of Wired's allegorical use of language; "The metaphors were a way of dealing with his isolation, I think." (p.12) This theme quickly gathers momentum, becoming more sinister in its paralytic power to cripple action;

Well, Brick, either you need heat or you need theory. I'm sure its weather reports on the radio giving you trouble, not the weather itself. I know that, he'd say. As soon as you'd say it he'd know it, Edna. Yes, but do you realize how it works? Because the weather reporter's topic is so familiar, each descriptive word choice, every inflection of voice is supercharged with code. (p.28)

Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man also invokes the weather in Stephen's musings on the hypnotic allure of the word;

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? (Joyce, Portrait p.428)

The power of the word is brought up again in the scrabble episode. Women are doubly constrained in this novel by virtue of their sex roles and again the escape valve is the word. It both keeps them in place as well as offering them escape. The word has the power to "collapse the firmament". Their sensuality is spent in the mundane, the domestic. Their "mixing, cooking, sock-washing fingers" arrange a naughty word and "they watch that very bad word wash away their sins like steady rain cleansing the rivers, like waves cleaning the beaches of debris." The forbidden word has the effects of a drug that heightens and then dulls the senses. The women are voyeurs, the word a sexual surrogate.

The narrative voice is named towards the end of the novel. Initially the voice appears to belong to a whole Brick, looking back, older. Only in the last part of the novel is this voice described as Brick's amanuensis, his literary assistant or scribe, his own personal redactor. The redactive voice comprises "one tenth" of the personality, the distilled essence of the soul. Brick's body survives in a fashion that is never quite clarified, but is clearly subordinate to the re-writer of his own history. Early on the voice states that "my purpose isn't to reconstruct his life". He isn't "about to dig into his mom's box of certificates, clippings and yearbooks to document his accomplishments". Biographers are held in suspicion, perhaps even more so if they are autobiographers (of sorts). Brick is dead yet lives on in end-time where the text must, of necessity, change. Now almost wholly dependent upon the computer, their relationship intensifies. The historical narrator is redundant in the post apocalyptical era, he needs to author another kind of text. Presumably, he will need help.

Mirrored through Brick's humanity and subsequent resurrection emerges the idea of the imperfect Jesus. Brick, the perfect technical, but mechanically inept, writer of do-it-yourself manuals is reminiscent of Jesus the carpenter who never made anything. Brick's business card TRUE RELIGION INC. Text Technologies identifies the redactor as the true architect of doctrine. The misinterpreted personality of Jesus gleaned from the "cut and paste" canon of the bible is woven throughout the expanse of the novel. The Jesus who never wrote but about whom much has been written is a "fill-in-the-blank story" with "so much language available you can talk your way into and out of any bag". Brick no longer believes in "a perfect Jesus" and wonders if there is "a new mythology for him". He asks "what happens when you give up such a big idea". His query is answered through the auspices of another machine. A photocopier that is not programmed to copy red wipes out Jesus' words in the rubric text, deleting centuries of careful distortion. "God, I imagined, had taken his words right off the page and demanded a rewrite", in effect, a third testament. The organizational sensibilities of machines reveal the strategy of previously baffling lines of logic. Such lines of reason were driven by a false sentiment, an appeal to emotions inevitably revealed to be deceitful and dangerous. Wired argues that only a passionless analysis can redeem us. Wired prophesies against prophesy:

...the nuclear bombs themselves hadn't scared sense into the powers that be, that people could no longer learn anything from apocalyptic visions, because reality had caught up with the worst you could write, that the most radical gospel was the simplest common sense: take a screwdriver to the bomb factory and take the thing apart. (p.123)

Uncle Gord is representative of the conventional word specialist who makes up versions of history that he knows to be inadequate. His speciality is the past. His mistake is to pretend that he is offering up anything new to understand it. While Brick's biographer suffers the penalty of exclusion by virtue of embracing a 'new language', Uncle Gord performs for two audiences. He attempts to atone for his role of "laxative in the CanDo lexicon" through his professorship, but only succeeds in playing "iconoclast in the service of the status quo". Uncle Gord has problems with 'drifting ambiguities' and knows that he is 'no teacher'. His thin veneer of linguistic dexterity is in the process of cracking like the very geography he is describing. When he was Brick's summer camp counsellor, he got his campers lost, put them in peril and then received kudos when he "led them out triumphantly to the lake". The ensuing diatribe on Canadiana is a further reference to the fraudulent usage of words, this time arranged into neat speeches designed to hide the shame of selling out the natives. But Uncle Gord, the historian who cannot manage words to do his bidding, appeals to the dictionary. Redress turns into reduce, into reductio ad absurdum; a virtually effortless ruling by the computer. His words are tracked and processed through his body, a bad case of diarrhoea his epilogue.

Biblical personalities are alluded to throughout the text. Old testament biblical prophets shadow the male characters and usher in the old promise of a new era. Without exception all are considered to be apocalyptical. Xed identifies with the post-exilic prophet Ezekiel, his "life in a wheelchair as a glorious reflection of Ezekiel's apocalyptic wheels." Ezekiel's ministry occurred in Babylon of many tongues, after being tossed out of the promised land, Israel. His chief call was to preach against assimilation. It was Ezekiel's responsibility to condemn the city of Jerusalem during its final years, deal with questions of relative guilt and innocence before and after its fall, and argue forcefully for the hope of a new Exodus.

Brick is identified with Jeremiah, himself a precursor to Jesus through the Davidic line who speaks of the future restoration of the dynasty of David through a descendant of his at an unspecified time. The messianic hopes of the Hebrew Bible were re-interpreted in the New Testament and Jeremiah transformed into an aspect of Jesus:

Moore asks him if he really wants his copy to read, "Jesus was a bullfrog when he walked upon the water." ... " Yes," says Moore,"I know it's Leonard Cohen, but who is this Jesus? The bullfrog's supposed to be Jeremiah, isn't it? And Jesus a sailor? I think you can make your point, whatever it is, with Jeremiah." (p.80)

Finally the narrator identifies himself in the last bit of the book. Brick kills himself in the plane. The amanuenses claims that nine tenths of Brick is gone and only the writing remains. This is a bizarre suggestion that the body is not really linked to the mind. The body is being drained of importance, Brick and his computer are sequestered in the basement, mutually dependent. Experience has ended, and while the amanuensis apologizes for writing about the past, there is precious little else to write on as no new experiences beyond his re-imagination suffice. What kind of writing would this produce? This appears to suggest the new text, the end time text. But Brick only seems capable of circling the spectre of his own fresh remains. The stages of self-awareness for the amanuenses are scribe, reporter, editor, assassin. The resurrection of the text is at hand only through the assassination of old forms and strategies. The eradication of sentimentality from the text is one means of constructing a new sensibility;

I could not imagine Brick imparting any predetermined structure to his work. The other and terrifying possibility was that he might ask me to write something up from the notes alone, on my own. At the time I was thinking that this could finish me... It really was him or me; I have no regrets. But I could never resent Brick for long after these blow-ups, because in less than five minutes his tears of remorse would mingle with mine of submission, sometimes on the same page, and warm feelings of oneness would dissolve our pain away. (p.149)

However, the amanuensis has not done away with passion at all. Granted, he is an order of magnitude more emotionally disciplined than the unressurected Brick but lacks the arid authority of the computer.

Brick again is linked to Jesus when he sees the futility of escaping God and identifying himself as a prophet. He meets the prototypical biblical criterion of being 'chosen' against his will. He is literally stalked by God and coerced through aggressive sexual seduction into a baptism of the flesh. Brick thought God would "want to talk to me about my salvation." God rejoins that he must "have me confused with someone else." Brick is only interested in God until he orgasms. Once his need is served he loses interest. The mundane supersedes the sublime. The seductive word-play of the familiar God of biblical text has nothing to do with the self-serving stalker God that Brick encounters. Ultimately, Brick gets skinned alive when he follows God's dictates.

Finally, Brick's resurrection is unsatisfactory and introduces more questions than it resolves. He is still "plodding about" a gravitational bound "Newtonian universe in which all of us know to be no longer adequate". The pull of gravity seems even stronger when we see that he is now confined to the basement. If this be the resurrection, then this recursive circling of memory is less than the sum of its former parts. It is only a matter of time before the computer tests its power in time honoured literary tradition;

When you type for a guy as long as I have you begin to participate. Even way back, somehow unconsciously driven, I couldn't stand to see a story go through my fingers without making some contribution. Even if it was just to trip it up a bit, test it for character, see if it was going anywhere. Now I realize it was an urge to tell Brick's story myself. Call it selfishness. (p.147)

Informed by the shattering of old structures, we have character fragments speaking in tongues, glimpsed through a fractional piece of an already splintered Brick. The key to Uncle Gord's dilemma is collated and resolved through the logical word progression of the computer. Wisdom is no longer the province of the old sages. In fact, a treatise on chaos maintains that "it's easier to argue for the impossibility of a car ever going where you want it to."

Chronological or historical time is done away with in the last part of the novel. Similar to the final chapter of Ulysses by James Joyce, the last part of Brick, Looking Up, uses a stream of consciousness narrative. Yes, the last word in Ulysses, extended by the computer into Yes/ESC in Brick, Looking Up, asks us to remove ourselves from Molly Bloom's earthy affirmation and escape the terrestrial order.

This highly contrived structure dominates personality in such a fashion that compassion seems curiously absent from the text. Only rational reaction seems laudatory. There is no room for Brick's largely unreasonable love for June in a landscape dedicated to ferreting out the swindle of facile emotional appeals. Hence, in the final pages, he can no longer imagine her. In place of the commiseration/empathy we would feel for each character's plight, we rather view them under glass. Emotionally inaccessible, the call to anxiety and disbelief overwhelms any compassion we might feel. We relax only when Brick is a child grappling with snowshoes, moving through the naturalistic terrain of childhood, unselfconscious, unconcerned with fraudulence. Curiously, this passage occurs towards the end of the novel and provokes grief for what is lost rather than anticipation for the more open-ended universe to come. The old textual style is interwoven, mingled with the new, and while it is never completely obliterated, it is now furtive and fleeting, shadowed and enclosed within the new categorization structures of computerized necromancy. A portent of things to come, it is only fitting that the computer should have the last word.