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
John remembers traveling to Des Moines with his grandfather to watch Bud Fowler play for Keokuk, when he was about 10. The game was uneventful until it got rained out in the fifth inning. John was rather relieved, but for his grandfather, it was yet one more frustration. He remembers thinking that the storm’s thunder and lightning were like “Creation tipping its hat” to his grandfather—as his mother always said, he did attract “terrible” friends, like John Brown and Jim Lane. It was a few weeks after this event that John’s grandfather went off to Kansas. John realizes that this memory consists of very little. But in retrospect he wonders if Kansas “transformed[] itself from memory to intention” as his grandfather sat there beside him.
John offers another piece of his grandfather’s story here. John Brown was a radical antislavery activist who was executed for treason in 1859, and James Henry Lane was a controversial Kansas politician who died by suicide in 1866. It’s easy to see why John’s mother felt uneasy about her father-in-law’s friends, and why John associated his grandfather with lightning, which is throughout the book symbolizes divine power bursting into the world. John regarded his grandfather as a force of nature who couldn’t be content to watch baseball games and needed to be active in the world instead.
Themes
John remembers walking with his father away from the graveyard in the moonlight, and his father remarked that everybody in Kansas saw the same thing they had just seen—the alignment of sunset and moonrise. John knows his father meant that they hadn’t experienced anything special; his father never talked about visions or the miraculous. Nevertheless John sensed a “sweet strength” in them both and watched his father wipe his eyes.
John flashes forward to visiting his grandfather’s grave; since only about two years would have passed since the baseball game, John’s grandfather didn’t live a terribly long time after he made the decision to return to Kansas. After witnessing the stunning sunset in the graveyard, John’s father pointed out that the experience wasn’t unique to them. This seems to have been part of his father’s general reticence about the miraculous, yet that doesn’t mean he was unmoved by the sight.
Themes
Once, John’s grandfather told him about a vision he had when he was 16, after falling asleep by the fire. He saw the Lord extending chained arms to him. He woke knowing he had to go to Kansas to join the abolitionist cause. In those days, men wanted to be useful, and their worst fear was aimlessness. John respects that. When he spoke to his father about the vision, his father said, “it was the times,” as if to reassure John that nothing like that would happen to him. And he did take comfort in it, which he now thinks remarkable.
John’s grandfather had a very different attitude about the miraculous, since he had a life-changing vision at a young age. John suggests that the men of his grandfather’s generation felt called to make a difference in the world. But perhaps because of his own father’s radicalism, John’s father was more skeptical of visions and the drastic actions they led to. John hints that he’s more sympathetic to his grandfather’s desires, though he also refrained from such radicalism himself.
Themes
John remarks that his grandfather always seemed as if he’d just been struck by lightning and was “the most unreposeful human being” he ever knew. He and his friends seemed like Old Testament prophets forced into retirement. They’d studied at Lane and Oberlin and knew biblical languages and classic literature; they set up a college in Iowa that produced many foreign missionaries. But it makes sense to John that his grandfather’s grave “look[ed] like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire.”
John reprises the fire imagery to describe his grandfather as somehow struck by divine power, giving him a restlessness that even death could scarcely “smother.” He suggests that even though his grandfather and friends did more conventional things like getting a seminary education and training missionaries, their desires to change the world burned through those conventional boundaries. Lane Theological Seminary was a Presbyterian seminary near Cincinnati that had close ties with radically abolitionist Oberlin College, southwest of Cleveland.
Themes
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