We also find certain of her characterological preoccupations, spanning the breadth of her work, more profoundly and successfully compounded in this novel. Her transients are her most enigmatic and spellbinding characters; they live according to their own clocks, their own mores, their own vast systems of signs. The transient cherishes freedom and fears most of all being tied to some place, or to some people who want to hold them fast.
The Robinsonian transient is effectively a solipsist, though this is not a narcissistic solipsism. It is fundamentally the state of being solus , with and by oneself. It is a loneliness always set against the strictures of a society that behaves like a host expelling a foreign body. The loneliness of the transient knows only the vocabulary of the self, because it is prevented in the first place from building bridges across the gulf of subjectivity to the selves of others. The transient reenacts this failure perpetually by way of attempting to cope with loneliness — that is, by traveling, moving, in a vicious circle.
This misconception is undone in Jack , where the transient is given a further thickness. Most of us are. It is because he wants nothing more than to do no harm, and yet is unable not to harm, that he avoids all ties. The transient, Jack reveals, knows only what the most powerful empath can know: what it really means to harm another. It is a devastating knowledge, the purest understanding of fellow-feeling, and it leads only to the habits of the snail — a gathering-in, which amounts to a pushing-away, not for the sake of oneself but for that of another.
Keep her safe from me. Della comes to see what we see, and it is for that reason and apparently that reason alone that she is moved to love Jack. Her disquisition on the nature of the soul is specifically about him and what she sees in him:. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it. The soul is a transient, then, of a noumenal, idealized nature — making no history in the world, causing no injury, suffering no guilt.
It aspires to a lightness of being, a touchlessness, which in less idealized terms must be a harmlessness. He lives in a mostly miserable haze, which in turn gives the book a hazy quality, ungrounded and restless. Into this life comes, accidentally, a love. Jack sees a woman caught in the rain and offers her an umbrella; they get to talking; she invites him into her house for tea. Della is a schoolteacher and the daughter of a powerful minister, a respectable woman, and yet they share a sense of alienation.
Hers is vague and hard to parse, as she acknowledges. There is no turning away. They might wish to help it. Della is a Black woman; Jack is white. In s St. Louis, where they live, interracial relationships are punished with imprisonment. Jack is a danger to Della simply because he is white—not to mention a vagrant, a drunk, a man with jail time and dishonorable relationships in his past. She will lose her job, the support of her family, and any ability to remain a part of polite society, all vital protections against the racist systems that already render her survival and thriving precarious.
Jack, whose intentions are now semi-reliably honorable, wants to do right by her, which is to say leave her alone. What to make of this relationship as an object lesson or a metaphor, as one senses Robinson conceived it? They are clear foils: Della has religion; Jack does not. Can it save him? In his eyes she becomes almost an abstraction, quietly omniscient:.
Yet the deep racism of the society they inhabit muddles any clean reading of Della and Jack as another Robinsonian insider-outsider duo. He was active in the abolitionist cause and aided John Brown. He served as a chaplain in the Civil War. Near the end of his life he went off to Kansas, leaving his family. A preacher and a pacifist who had a difficult relationship with his own father. He joins the army near the end of the war.
A young boy of about seven, he remains unnamed throughout the novel. He is serious, introverted, and sweet. He likes television playing outside with his friend Tobias, and playing baseball with Jack.
Ames's second wife, the mother of his son, and his true love. Lila is a serious, sad woman; the events of her past are unknown.
She has always longed for a settled life, which she found in Ames. She is uneducated but smart, and loves to learn. Her knowledge of religion was limited when she first came to Ames's church. His wife—spoiler alert—is black, which means that she and Jack have to deal with laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Such laws wouldn't be an issue in Gilead, but still, Gilead's black residents are long gone. A church fire drove them out. In the end, Jack leaves Gilead, probably not soon to return.
His future is as uncertain as his life has been. Jack's something of a symbol for the uncertainty of the modern world creeping into Gilead—and into the religious convictions of its Christian faithful. Should he be punished for what he has done, or should he be forgiven? Is there room for his unconventional family in this traditional world? Will people be compassionate or judgmental?
In one key scene, Jack Boughton asks John Ames what he thinks about predestination. He's not looking to pick a fight at least not entirely , and it's not the fun of a debate that interests him. Deep down, Jack fears he may be predestined for an unhappy, squalid existence, no matter what choices he makes.
All the love that's been poured on him seems not to have given him the grace to reform his life.
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