Gilead

For John, writing is an intimate act. He comments that when writing, “You feel like you are with someone” (19). Writing is like praying. Writing this letter to his son, he feels close to him both as a child and as the man John imagines he will become—if the letter is not lost or burned, which John fears and mentions multiple times. As John writes, he frames his life and memories as he wants his son to see them, and so his son only receives John’s perspective.

John views memory as immortal. Memory never dies; one can always return to it in one’s mind. At the same time, memory has no fixed reality. Memory is mutable: it can change over time, and by one’s desires, as John wants to remember eating the ashy biscuit from his father’s hand rather than his father breaking the biscuit and handing it to him. John extends this understanding of the fluidity of memory to include life experiences: “you never do know the actual nature of even your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature” (95).

John’s writing, his 50 years of sermons, is a record of his innermost life, yet John notably says that his writing for his son differs from the way he speaks and from his writing for the pulpit. Instead, John tries to “write the way I think” (29). John’s thoughts flow like his memories: they are nonlinear and episodic, and may or may not connect to one another.

John recommends that when his son gets older, he should write an account of himself like this letter, since “age has a tendency to make one’s sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust” (210). Writing restores John’s sense of self, solidifies his memories, and brings him “back into the world” (238), granting him life. The creative act of writing and remembering defies death.

John, with his advanced age and deteriorating physical health, suffers the same humiliation of decay as his church, which will die along with him, torn down after he passes. John vacillates between acceptance of his age and anger about the losses it will bring—including the loss of himself.

John is frustrated because after so long alone, he is at last “at home in the world” (4). John has the family he has always desired: the love of his life in Lila and the immeasurable joy of a son. For a long while, he coveted—or resented—the fact that people he loved had what he wanted but lacked (154). Now he covets youth and time. He envies Jack’s energy and vitality to play catch with his son. He envies Boughton because his friend got to watch his wife grow old and his son grow up, which John will not. Rather, “the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction” (210).

Jack has youth and time but covets what he has lost and what John has in Gilead: a safe home and loving family. Talking with Lila one night, Jack admits that he likes to look in the windows of homes and imagine what a settled home would be like (200). While Lila always knew she wanted this security, Jack thought of it as constrictive. Now, older Jack longs for this staid peace. Jack and John share similar losses.

Boughton, too, bemoans his aches and age, complaining that “Jesus never had to be old” (236). He envies John. Boughton knows that Jack talks to John and Lila and is hurt that Jack doesn’t share his troubles with him (210). John knows that Boughton would be jealous to hear that John blessed his son. Boughton’s envy stems from his overwhelming love of Jack and his thwarted desire to truly know his son.

Life is all the more precious to John because he has little of it left. He takes joy in the natural world around him, noting the way trees smell different at nighttime, savoring how light shines through the church windows, and basking in the happiness of his son and wife blowing soap bubbles on the cat. He wakes each morning “like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes” (67). There is a human beauty in the physical world that he will “miss bitterly” (53). He points out that even Jesus wept when he was betrayed, and it is natural that John “dreads” what he should “welcome” (141). John takes consolation in lines he quotes from “Death Be Not Proud,” one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. John and his loved ones will rise up eternally, and “death, thou shalt die” (77). While his studies are intellectually comforting, John is not emotionally ready to die. He endeavors to enjoy every minute of his life.

Despite his faith that the afterlife will be wonderful, John can’t imagine that the earthly life will be greatly surpassed or forgotten, saying, “I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade, entirely” (57). John doesn’t want to leave this life, and he doesn’t want to forget it. John sees heaven in the context of this world, imagining being able to marry and visualizing meeting his son after they both die, when neither of them will be old but instead “like brothers” (165). The ideal afterlife is a kind of augmented reality, as Boughton likes to envision, where John will be “imperishable” and “more alive than I ever have been, in the strength of my youth, with dear ones beside me” (53). John has a very different idea of heaven than “you would see in the old paintings” (149), and it is very like the life he lives now.

John writes early in his letter that “[a] man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension” (7). This idea is one of Gilead’s major themes. Despite being devout men of the cloth, the Ames men don’t understand or agree with each other, which leads to disappointment on all sides.

All the adult sons in Gilead have let their fathers down: John’s grandfather was disappointed that his son did not follow his militant ways, and John’s father was disappointed that John never left Gilead to make something better of himself. Sons also share their fathers’ guilt. John feels implicated in what he assumes is his grandfather’s crime and his father’s cover-up before even knowing what it is (82). John writes that his father “felt certain that he should hide the guilt of his father,” and John thinks he “should also hide the guilt of mine” (85). John’s father’s last words to the grandfather were angry, and he regretted them, only asking forgiveness after the old man’s death in his prayer over the grandfather’s grave. We sense that John’s last conversation with his father was also angry, judging by the way he burned his father’s last letter, never saw his father again, and felt cast away. John is sad about this but not regretful. There is not much forgiveness between the Ames men.

In contrast, Jack, the prodigal son, repeatedly lets his father down, but Boughton “forgives him always, instantly” (189). Like fathers in the bible, Boughton honors his child; John notes that biblical fathers don’t rebuke their sons, except for “poor old Jacob,” who rebukes them as he blesses them (136). Boughton never rebukes Jack and is hurt when John, essentially a surrogate father to Jack, is slow to forgive him. Perhaps because of his father’s desperate forgiveness, Jack does not share his faith and cannot confide in him. John finds Boughton’s blind love of Jack irritating, arguing that while there is a “disjunction between our Father’s love and our deserving” (73), it is misplaced between human parents and children—at least between Boughton and Jack. John then does an about face, assuring his own son that even if he is not an excellent man, John will still love him completely (73), revealing his hypocrisy and prejudice against Jack. John understands the nature of forgiveness, that the role of a father is to forgive, and that half of the gift of forgiveness is the ability to forgive and thus feel the will of God (161). Forgiveness is the only way to heal disappointment, but forgiveness is hard for John.