Letters from the Old Generation to the New
Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead is composed as an intimate letter from a dying father to his adolescent son. The novel itself portrays the family lives and famial relations of an 19th century rural town. The father, Reverend John Ames narrates his life in great detail in hopes that his son will one day read it and get to know the father he would soon lose. However John Ames does worry that the letter may be ruined or burned by the time his son can read it.
Evenso, the stories Reverend John Ames mentions are not told in chronological or any specific order. The stories are written as they come into John Ames stream of conciousness, especially when it came to family, friends, hardships,leisure, and the loss of a loved one.Mr.Ames not only talks about his life as a child but compares his life to his son’s which will be entirely different aside from his son not growing up with a father. For one thing, his son won’t mistake any random letters as sermons like he did which means John Ames’ father was a preacher who lived by the book and expected his offspring to do the same. Yet, our narrator Mr.Ames doesn’t impose religion on his son, but lets his wife gradually teach it to him. Then again this could be because he is dying, if he were completely healthy maybe he would have been the one teaching his son about the Lord and His word.
Because Mr.Ames grew up in a household where his father was a Reverend he perceived certain things differently than your average Joe. Water meant holy water that baptized the young as a new member of the Christian faith in a house of God. Yet water had had a holy meaning until he saw a young couple laughing and rejocing in it much the way Mr.Ames son and his friend Tobias do as he writes in his letter.
John Ames, his father, and his grandfather all grew up in a different era. The time they grew up in were harder times, yet at the same time were better because people communicated withone another and in doing so were more kindred with one another. For example when John Ames was searching for his grandfather’s grave with his father a woman not only directed them toward his grave site but also allowed them to take shelter in her home a few days while they tidied up the grave yard which had an old cowbell hanging off the fence. Today we would be lucky if someone had enough courtesy to give us directions without seeming irritated.
As a reader you can’t help but feel for Mr. Ames because the stories he writes in the letter as he is dying would have been things he would have said throughout his son’s life, as father to son. Yet, in the father’s perception this would have been made possible if he weren’t so old. In this novel old seems to have a positive and negative association which is something that John Ames mentions to his son earlier on within his letter. The narrator will acknowledge their hometown as “this old town” and “old Boughton” in respectable way, yet will make condenscending comments about his old age- especially within comparison to his second wife where there’s a huge age gap. At the same time his wife uses old within an affectionate context when it comes to her husband which can be seen within the following passage from the book:
Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing thereswaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, “Why’d you hav to be so damn old?”
I ask myself the same question.
Mrs.Ames does call attention to Mr.Ames being old but wishes he wasn’t because if he were younger the doctor could possibly be wrong about his fatal condition and she could grow old with him. Even though Mr.Ames is dying he still makes attempts at enjoying what he has left of his life even though he is unsure as to how to go about executing it. Perhaps his way of enjoying what time he has left is dancing to a song on the radio every now and then. However what matters to him is experience and enjoying life surrounded by those who love you because he had felt alone for a long while before his second wife came into his life and bore him a wonderful son. As the saying goes “do not fear death, but the unlived life” (this quote might have been from that old movie Tuck Everlasting).
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