Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Gilead, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Life, Death, and Beauty
Christian Faith, Mystery, and Ministry
Memory, Vision, and Conviction
Estrangement and Reconciliation
Loneliness and Love
Summary
Analysis
Sometimes it seems to John as if God breathes on creation and it becomes briefly radiant. He said that in the Pentecost sermon. And yet the Lord is more extravagant than those words suggest. No matter where you look, the world “can shine like transfiguration.” You just have to be willing to see it—but who has that kind of courage?
John is going to ask Lila to have the church deacons burn his old sermons. There are enough to make a good fire. She can keep some of them if she likes, but he doesn’t want her to worry about them too much. He figures that “they mattered or they didn’t.”
John never did get around to dealing with the stacks of old sermons, and now it doesn’t really seem to matter. They were important when he wrote them, as truthful words always are, but their day is past.
Themes
There are two occasions when Creation’s beauty is especially apparent. One is when we feel our insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s insufficiency to us. John thinks God must give people a special courage to “acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear.” Such courage allows people to make themselves useful—that is, to be generous. John has nothing to leave his son but “the ruins of old courage.” He trusts that someday God will fan it into flame again.
Here, John suggests that people see the world’s beauty especially when the world feels like more than they can bear. It’s not totally clear what John means by this, but he implies that it has to do with being given a vocation—a calling—to serve the world’s needs. This takes courage, and the courage John has received—especially his grandfather’s and father’s—he now passes down to his son.
Themes
John reflects that he loves the prairie. Many times he has watched dawn break, flooding the land with light, and nothing on the horizon to interrupt the view.
John rejoices once more in the beauty he sees in the world. The imagery of unimpeded light suggests a glimpse—maybe a vision of sorts—of heaven.
Themes
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John thinks that Gilead is “Christlike” in the way it’s so unadorned and unregarded. He thinks it’s fine if his son leaves someday. After all, Gilead does look like “whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little.” But that is still hope. He loves this town, and sometimes he thinks that being buried here will be his final gesture of love for it. Here he will “smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence.”
Though he has felt disillusioned with Gilead, John now seems able to regard it with affection again, and realism. Even if the town isn’t what it once was, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still contain something that’s beautiful or even divine. He uses fire imagery to suggest that (like his grandfather) he will “smolder” until God’s light sets the world totally aflame.
Themes
John will pray that his son will grow up a brave man in a brave country, and that he will find a way to be useful. He’ll pray, and then he will sleep.
John’s final prayer for his son is that he will be given the courage to be “useful”—to see the world’s pain and beauty and do his best to serve it. Though John intends to close the letter here, his final words about prayer and sleep also suggest that, in fact, he is about to die in peace.
Themes
