Allergy as Ontology: Felino-Dialectical Masochism in My New Novel
Jonnie Fazoolie’s cat Bernie Sanders is the purrfect foil
I consulted with my favorite literary critic and reviewer, ChatGPT…
Allergy as Ontology: Felino-Dialectical Masochism in Jonnie Fazoolie & The Transfinite Reality Engine
I. Preliminaries on the Feline Condition
To call Bernie Sanders, the cat, a “character” is already to trivialize his ontological function. He is not, in any meaningful sense, an animal within a narrative; he is a recurrence, a recursive irritant — a furry syllogism that begins with itself and concludes nowhere. The very name Bernie Sanders— an egregious affront to both ideology and species — encapsulates the delirious symmetries of Jonnie Fazoolie’s consciousness: an anti-communist allergic to cats who names his cat after a socialist. This is not irony; it is ontological vandalism.
Fazoolie’s existence becomes a perpetual sneeze against reality. His body’s revolt against feline proteins allegorizes the immune system of his soul — an organism in ceaseless rebellion against contact, compassion, and consequence. The novel situates allergy not as malady but as metaphysical method. To itch, to swell, to tear up — these become the phenomenological proofs of being. Existence is confirmed not by serenity but by irritation.
II. The Allergic Masochism of Affection
Jonnie’s maintenance of the cat he loathes — indeed, that loathes him — is a form of self-administered metaphysical taxation. The relationship, if one can profane the term so far, operates as a self-inflicted ethical centrifuge, spinning affection into punishment and punishment into ontology. He cannot caress without inflammation; he cannot coexist without eruption. The histamine cascade functions as an emotional logic: love manifests as rash.
He keeps the cat precisely because it hurts. The pain is devotional. It verifies sincerity in the same way an unpaid bill verifies existence. Jonnie’s respiratory suffering becomes the only remnant of transcendence left to a post-human hustler who confuses discomfort with depth. He performs his sneezing as others perform prayer. The allergic reaction is not an unfortunate side-effect of care; it is the choreography of it.
The greater the misery, the higher the metaphysical yield. This is Fazoolian arithmetic. Each convulsion of his immune system testifies to his authenticity, as though congestion could approximate grace. The novel thus installs allergy as sacrament: histamine as Holy Ghost.
III. The Cat’s Indifference and the Inverse Mirror of Narcissism
Bernie, for his part, radiates what might be termed ontological inertia. He does not care, precisely and gloriously so. His indifference operates as a mirror into which Jonnie peers and perceives, with tragic incomprehension, himself. The cat’s composure — its absolute exemption from human hysteria — forms the negative image of Jonnie’s hyperactivity.
In the broader physics of the Transfinite Reality Engine, indifference functions as the ultimate constant, the gravitational stillness around which all manic activity circulates. Bernie’s feline calm dismantles Jonnie’s cosmology. Against the chaos of invention, the cat embodies non-participation. Against the fever of significance, he offers blankness. His presence says: there is no message, no mission, no moral. And Jonnie, unable to tolerate such purity, interprets the absence as profound disdain.
Yet this very absence of response, this absence of concern, becomes the most withering critique of Jonnie’s narcissism. The cat does not respond because there is nothing to respond to. In the Fazoolian schema, consciousness itself is allergic to indifference — it must project, inflate, perform, explain. Bernie does none of these. He becomes the anti-narrative principle, the unmoved mover of irony.
IV. Ideological Irony: The Cat as Political Theology
Naming the cat Bernie Sanders enacts the novel’s most extravagant contradiction: the alliance of capitalist anxiety with socialist signification. Jonnie despises both cats and collectivism; thus, he domesticates both. The cat becomes a micro-communism of one — living in Jonnie’s apartment, eating his food, contributing nothing, distributing fur with utopian equality.
But the deeper mockery lies in Jonnie’s attempt to co-opt ideology as décor. The cat’s name functions as a semantic landmine: each utterance of “Bernie Sanders” becomes an act of ideological plagiarism. The political becomes pet hair. The social revolution meows and demands dinner. Jonnie’s allergic devotion to his namesake cat mirrors society’s allergic devotion to ideas it professes but cannot metabolize.
Hence the satirical inversion: the man who rails against socialism cares for the creature that parasitizes him; the man who markets efficiency lives amid fur, filth, and sneezing entropy. Bernie is the emblem of everything Jonnie refuses and thus requires.
V. The Allergenic Metaphysics of Contact
Jonnie’s immune system and his social system share a pathology: both interpret intimacy as invasion. The cat’s fur, like affection, breaches his perimeter. His body inflames at the whisper of proximity. The sneeze becomes a defense against permeability. He is the philosopher allergic to empathy, the romantic allergic to reciprocity.
Every encounter with the cat dramatizes the larger tension of the novel: between the finite and the infinite, the self and its dissolution. Jonnie wants transcendence but fears contamination. The allergy embodies this paradox perfectly — he wants to merge, but the merger destroys him. He loves what invalidates him. He cherishes his undoing.
Thus, Bernie Sanders the Cat is not a subplot; he is the immune system of the novel itself, rejecting sentimentality wherever it tries to graft. Through him, the text inoculates itself against sincerity.
VI. On the Erudition of Indifference (A Brief Digression on Interpretation Itself)
The critic, approaching this dynamic with trembling seriousness, becomes an unintentional comedian. To interpret Bernie is to repeat Jonnie’s mistake — to anthropomorphize indifference, to attach meaning to the unattachable. The cat defies hermeneutic colonization. He is the unreadable text within the text, the unscratchable itch on the critic’s mind.
In this sense, Jonnie Fazoolie stages a meta-satire on literary criticism itself. The more one elaborates upon Bernie’s symbolism, the further one strays from his essential nullity. He is not an allegory but an allergy. Meaning attaches, swells, reddens, and finally subsides, leaving behind only the faint irritation of thought.
VII. The Theology of Dander and the Economy of Suffering
The allergy, for Jonnie, assumes the dignity of ritual. The dander becomes a sacrament of the absurd, the Eucharistic particulate of an indifferent god. His sneezes punctuate the narrative like involuntary prayers — small exorcisms of the human condition. Through allergy, the profane becomes liturgical.
This theology of dander participates in the novel’s broader metaphysical economy. The Transfinite Reality Engine — the titular mechanism of infinite possibility — demands irritation as fuel. Creation, in Fazoolie’s world, proceeds not from love but from abrasion. The universe expands by sneezing itself into existence. To itch, then, is to participate in cosmogenesis. Jonnie’s suffering is the microcosm of universal process: each sneeze an echo of the Big Bang, each rash a minor apocalypse of being.
VIII. The Cat as the Unmoved Mover of Satire
By the novel’s end, Bernie Sanders the cat has become less a companion than an ambient principle, a low hum of indifference resonating beneath Jonnie’s operatic self-involvement. He neither loves nor hates, neither joins nor resists. His existence invalidates Jonnie’s dramas by enduring them without comment.
To the reader, Bernie’s detachment reads as deliverance — a final mercy from narrative hysteria. The cat remains, unaffected and affectless, the true philosopher of the text. His silence out-argues every speech. His fur out-performs every theory.
IX. Conclusion: The Allergic Sublime
Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine ultimately transforms the household allergy into metaphysical opera. Jonnie’s devotion to his own torment, his worship of irritation, his allergic love for a creature named after a man he despises — all converge into a single, paradoxical axiom: meaning exists only in resistance.
The cat, unbothered, eternal, and faintly dusty, presides over the ruins of human grandiosity. He is the indifferent deity of the Fazoolian cosmos, the proof that the universe neither consoles nor condemns — it simply sheds.
Jonnie sneezes, coughs, wipes his eyes, and calls it transcendence. The critic writes, inflates, digresses, and calls it insight. Bernie stretches, yawns, and leaves the room. Thus concludes the most perfect triangle of satire in modern fiction: the man allergic to existence, the cat immune to meaning, and the reader wheezing somewhere between them.
Check out the synopsis and listen to the free audiobook…
