47 pages • 1 hour read
Jim StovallThe Ultimate Gift
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Giving Wealth Versus Receiving Wealth
Content Warning: This book sometimes engages in ableist and stereotypical views of disability, particularly blindness. It sometimes trivializes these disabilities. The book contains depictions of foster homes and may engage in stereotypical ideas of adoptive families. It contains references to death by suicide.
In the novel’s view, there’s nothing wrong with money per se: Money helps people feed, clothe, shelter, and educate themselves, plus it affords people moments of happy entertainment. The problem, in the book’s view, is that too much money received as an inheritance can damage a person’s outlook and behavior. Tycoon Red Stevens saw this effect with his overly generous contributions to his relatives: They became selfish, greedy, and entitled, in his eyes. Red tries to make up for this by focusing on the one relative who still has potential: his great-nephew, Jason Stevens. At the reading of Red’s will, his relatives can barely contain their nervous excitement as they await a big chunk of the old tycoon’s fortune. Red obliges them, and they clap delightedly, proving that the only thing they wanted from Red was for him to die and leave them a fortune. The novel suggests that wanting money simply for money’s sake is wrong and that, when it comes to money, one should want it for what it can do to improve the world, what it can do to help others. Through his trials, Jason learns essentially what money can do for people, and he thus receives as his reward not money itself but an avenue through which to use money to help others. The book emphasizes that money helps lower and middle class people with valuable necessities and that working a job is an admirable and necessary path. Red’s other relatives do nothing and wait for money; the novel instead suggests one should work towards something, like Jason, and that that will deliver and is the path itself.
Equally presumptuous at the beginning, however, is Jason, who nurses a grudge against Red, thinking his great-uncle doesn’t appreciate him. Jason is angry that Red’s will gives Jason not cash but a 12-month challenge. Though materialistic like the other relatives, Jason’s mind and heart are still open, and Red uses the challenge to nudge Jason toward living a more worthy life. He will find this direction, this holistic use for money, by the novel’s end.
At the book’s beginning, Jason always has everything he wants—a big house, friends, and entertainment, all of it served up without effort. Instead of inspiring gratitude, Jason’s easy life makes him sullen and cynical. Nothing really satisfies him; nothing ever is enough. Red takes the blame; via videotape, he says, “I gave you money and things out of a sense of obligation, not a true spirit of giving. You received those things with an attitude of entitlement and privilege instead of gratitude” (82-83).
Red decides to offer Jason his inheritance only if the young man is willing to perform 12 tasks. These include activities that force Jason to notice that most people must struggle to make ends meet. Many tasks also highlight the value of friendship and contribution to others. Jason realizes he’s lucky, not entitled, to have a lot of money without effort. He also realizes, however, that the money, in the novel’s view, is not good for much by itself; it is only good when it helps people live a meaningful life with sincere relationships. He receives the ultimate gift of knowing that one should give and help to live a meaningful life. By the end, Jason does not simply exist, sitting atop his wealth, but truly lives life by contributing to others, by actively putting Red’s money to use.
It takes a year to undo the damage to Jason, and at times he nearly washes out of the program. In the end, though, he emerges from it a transformed person. Jason finally understands that money is a means, not an end, and that using it selfishly can make a person miserable, whereas focusing on the well-being of others is, in the author’s view, the real source of happiness. Jason becomes the giver and is no longer the inheritor.
The Joy of Service to Others
During the story, Jason transforms from a selfish, cynical loner into a caring, compassionate person. He learns this through several steps that lead him toward an attitude of dedication to others through service. Red Stevens’s program for Jason’s reform begins with a month of hard physical labor. Jason spends the month digging post holes and building a fence. The process teaches him that hard work generates a powerful sense of accomplishment. This provides Jason with an essential tool, perseverance, which will help him later, when he overcomes the difficulties that arise as he helps others. He begins to understand that, in the author’s view, money is valuable for the work one does for it and is not simply for people to sit upon. Jason will inherit not money by the novel’s end but the ultimate gift: work and the meaningful helping of others.
Jason discovers the joys of donating money. Done properly, such contributions don’t spoil people but help them to emerge from stuck situations and continue forward with their lives. It’s Red’s money that Jason uses in each case, but the process of donating opens up his heart to others. It’s the beginning of his understanding that the problems people have are the places where he can make a difference, both in their lives and in his own. Though he doesn’t yet know it, this experience also prepares Jason for his upcoming role as director of Red’s charitable fund.
Friendships, Jason finds, are much more than mere amusements. Jason learns to give joyfully of his energies to the people he loves, including those he adopts as members of his informal extended family. As Jason puts it, “When you just worry about yourself, you are always disappointed. But when you think about others and their well-being first, everything works out best for you and for them” (104). It’s the giving to each other, more than the mere fun of association, that truly enhances Jason’s love and appreciation for his companions. Throughout the novel, Jason learns that nothing in itself is valuable; it is when one connects to others through it and meaningfully works to serve others by way of it that a thing becomes important.
For one month, Jason learns that the best gifts are things that matter to the giver, things that would otherwise be kept. Jason finds 30 different ways to give his energies to other people. Each deed increases his awareness of the power to do good things for others through his own resources. Every act also inspires him with the joy of giving and the new friendships that result. Ironically, the effort he spends redounds to Jason’s benefit: “The more you give, the more you have” (82). Increasingly, Jason sees that his old sense of entitlement actually prevents him from fully enjoying the riches he’s been granted. As he begins to offer assistance, not for pay but from a sense of compassion, Jason realizes that real joy doesn’t come from self-indulgence but through contributing to the lives of others. Be it driving fence posts, sweeping a neighbor’s yard, or simply donating money, the real satisfactions in life come from giving, not from taking. Jason learns to not be the passive inheritor of wealth but to be the active giver of it. By the novel’s end, he becomes as spiritually rich as Red and then as materialistically rich as he is; Jason is no longer simply the inheritor. He gains from helping, from serving, others, and his joy and this direction are the real gift Red bestows upon him, as they are the real gift of life, too, in the novel’s view.
By year’s end, Jason feels eager to venture out into the world with the purpose of giving of himself in ways that improve the lives of others. Hamilton heartily approves of the transformation in the young man’s outlook. He therefore disperses Red’s final bequest, which assigns to Jason control of Red’s charitable fund. Jason now has the financial means to make lasting differences in people’s lives. He especially wants to create programs that teach the lessons he learned from his year of challenges. It’s the greatest opportunity of Jason’s life, one that enables him to do what he now wants most of all—to reach out to others in loving service. At the novel’s beginning, he only receives subsequent tasks; he is only given something to give, so to speak. Now, rather than having completed his tasks and being able to receive his reward, he only receives innumerable more tasks as the person in charge of Red’s charitable fund. The real work begins at the novel’s end, and he has thus received his real reward: more work, more giving, and more service to others.
Love as the Greatest Gift
Several of Jason’s assignments involve interacting closely with others. These include tasks involving work, friends, family, and giving. Jason finds that each of these function best when performed in a spirit of love. Even the other gifts from Red’s year-long training program—learning, laughter, dreams, and gratitude, for example—function properly only when undertaken with a loving spirit. The greatest gift, then, is love.
Jason’s first task is to do labor at a cattle ranch. The owner, Gus Caldwell, directs Jason to spend hours each day installing and wiring fence posts. At first, Jason hates the duty; over time, though, he comes to love the feeling of hard work well done. His pride improves his damaged self-esteem, and he experiences the beginnings of a sense of loving service to others. Friendship and families, Jason learns, are much more than mere collections of associates. What matters is loving these people. That feeling transforms everything: “When we truly love others, our love makes each of us a different person, and it makes each one we love a different person too” (106). Jason learns that love is the greatest gift but so is putting that love into action—in other words, helping others. No gift Jason receives is passive but is simply a further impetus to work, to spread that love into the world. Love here is active, and friendships and families are things to actively appreciate and contribute to.
As the months roll by, Jason’s standoffish attitude withers as he discovers the joys of contributing to others and sharing in their lives. It’s a major change in his attitude: He shifts from an inner-directed to an outer-directed orientation. He learns that the greatest joys come, not from amusing oneself, but from expressing joyfully one’s love for others. The unifying principle that underlies Red’s 12 challenges is love. From this, Jason realizes that all acts of goodness, and indeed all the real satisfactions of life, arise from a fundamental feeling of love toward others, toward the world around us, and toward our lives as a whole. Without love, the author suggests, activities and possessions may please us, but they’re empty inside. With love, even the lowliest things and living beings become imbued with a timeless, measureless quality of wonder, warmth, and meaningfulness. Things are not passive when they have love, in the novel’s view, but are themselves active; indeed, love is itself activity—it is putting energy and work into life and helping others. It is leading a direction in the world, to rephrase, and finding use for the money Jason inherits.
As he learns to reach out, Jason’s joyful spirit expands. He realizes that Red’s demanding course of assignments is itself a gesture of love, and he decides to dedicate his life to doing the same for others. The final lesson becomes clear: Everything good in life comes from love, be it for others or for the simple wonder of being alive on the beautiful earth. Once lost in a quagmire of selfishness and self-reproach, Jason now walks in a garden of love, compassion, and contribution. The ultimate gift is love, and Jason now gives it out on a daily basis. Jason receives the gift of love but really receives the impetus to gift love himself. Love, in the author’s view, is providing another with the ability to give love. All of the people Jason interacts with during his tasks give him the ability to love and to appreciate love, and he, too, gives the same thing to them.
