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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Doubt: A Parable, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Moral Responsibility
Power and Accountability
Doubt and Uncertainty
Tradition vs. Change
Summary
Analysis
Father Flynn addresses St. Nicholas Church, delivering a sermon about doubt. “What do you do when you’re not sure?” he begins, going on to point out that many people experience this feeling. He references the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that took place one year ago, pointing out that everyone felt a sense of “profound disorientation” and “despair” in the aftermath of the event. This, he argues, brought people together. “It was a time of people sitting together, bound together by a common feeling of hopelessness,” he says. “But think of that! Your bond with your fellow beings was your despair.”
Father Flynn’s sermon about doubt encourages the audience to consider the many different ways in which people can experience feelings of uncertainty. This interest makes sense for the play, considering that Doubt takes place in a religious setting. Consequently, the primary characters have devoted themselves to a life of faith, meaning that they most likely find moments of spiritual uncertainty especially alarming. However, Father Flynn suggests that doubt isn’t necessarily something that has to be feared, since it sometimes brings people together. In turn, the audience senses that doubt is a more complex emotion than it might otherwise seem.
Themes
Continuing his sermon, Father Flynn tells a story about a cargo ship that sinks in the middle of the ocean. Everyone onboard dies except one sailor, who builds a makeshift raft for himself and looks to the sky, navigating his way home using the stars. Knowing exactly which direction he needs to travel, he sets his course. However, thick clouds soon obscure the stars from him, rendering him unable to verify that he’s traveling in the correct direction. For twenty nights, he floats along like this, wondering if he’s still going the right way. “The message of the constellations—had he imagined it because of his desperate circumstance?” Father Flynn asks. “Or had he seen Truth once, and now had to hold on to it without further reassurance?”
The parable Father Flynn tells about the sailor is intended to symbolize the kind of blind faith true religious believers must adopt in order to feel comfortable about their spiritual convictions. Father Flynn implies that people have to “hold on” to their beliefs without constant “reassurance,” since there aren’t many times in a person’s life when the existence of God or heaven (for example) simply reveal themselves. In this way, then, Father Flynn advocates for the kind of unwavering belief that enables people to move forward with their convictions without requiring them to constantly analyze or interrogate them.
Themes
Father Flynn tells his congregation that the uncertainty the sailor experienced at sea is what it feels like to have a “crisis of faith.” He upholds that most people in the church know what this is like, so he tries to reassure them by saying, “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.”
It’s worth noting that Father Flynn ends his sermon without clarifying whether or not the sailor actually reaches land. In turn, the notion of blindly trusting a certain idea or belief seems somewhat ill-advised, at least in the context of this play, since Shanley subtly implies that the kind of unequivocal faith that Father Flynn champions does indeed require a person to take a sizable risk. There is, it seems, no knowing what might happen when a person holds so tightly to an idea “without further reassurance”—after all, even Father Flynn’s parable doesn’t manage to prove that unwavering faith will always lead to positive outcomes.
Themes
