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
Jack, or John Ames Boughton (John’s namesake), has called from St. Louis and is coming home soon. Glory came to tell John about it; her father is excited. John doesn’t know how one man could cause so much disappointment and so little hope. He is the most beloved Boughton child, but John hasn’t decided yet what to write about him. He is a prodigal son. And even though John knows that nobody deserves their Heavenly Father’s love, he always feels a little bothered when he sees a parent loving a child who clearly doesn’t deserve it.
Jack Boughton has come up a few times before, but almost nothing has been explained, and this is the first time it’s revealed that he’s named after John. John implies here that Jack’s history is troubled. “Prodigal son” refers to the biblical story of a son who squandered everything but, when he changed course in his life, was accepted by his father with open arms. As a preacher, John knows that story as well as anybody, but just because he affirms its meaning doesn’t mean he’s comfortable with it in practice.
Themes
This morning John did something foolish. He woke up before dawn and decided to walk to the church the way he used to do. He did leave a note for his wife. At first, she thought he’d wandered off to die alone. Sometimes he worries about his final hours and how his son will remember them. He sometimes forgets that he can’t depend on his body the way he used to. He reflects on how different the world seems at night, something he’s never gotten used to. This night, he was so fixed on the idea of sitting in the church that he didn’t think about how worried his wife would be to discover him missing.
John spent most of his life living alone, so it makes sense that in old age, he’s never fully gotten used to the fact that his actions—like taking a walk before dawn—affect other people and cause them worry. It’s also possible that at his age, he simply forgets about his limitations because he’s more focused on reliving memories, like enjoying the nighttime solitude and sitting in the quiet church.
Themes
But John says he has strayed from his subject—his son’s “begats”—and there’s so much left to say. His grandfather was in the Union Army. He was considered too old for the regular army, so he talked his way into a chaplaincy position. John’s father was born in Kansas because his own father had come from Maine to help Free Soilers establish the right to vote. The constitution they were going to vote on would decide whether Kansas joined the Union as a slave state or a free state. At the same time, people from Missouri came to Kansas hoping it would become a slave state. John’s father didn’t like to talk about those days, and after studying those times, John feels he was right. So much trouble has happened in the world since then, after all.
Notably, John doesn’t dwell on the scare he gave Lila—he seems eager to move on from the subject of his limitations, suggesting that although he accepts the reality of death, that doesn’t mean aging isn’t difficult. Instead, he quickly picks up his grandfather’s story again. He explains his grandfather’s motives for moving to Kansas: to help the territory enter the United States without allowing slavery within its borders. Though John’s grandfather uprooted his life to follow his convictions, John’s father is much more reticent about the troubles surrounding the Civil War. John understands this attitude, yet he apparently feels compelled to talk to his son about them, at least.
Themes
John’s family moved into this house when he was a little boy. Back then it had no electricity. His mother used to love her kitchen, especially the warmth of the stove. She drank a little whiskey for her aches and pains, and after a hard day, she sometimes fell asleep in front of the stove, sometimes letting an entire Sunday dinner burn.
John grew up in Gilead—in this very house, in fact, since his father was minister here before him. Again, John talks less about the women in his family, but his brief anecdotes are often pretty telling—like the fact that his mother’s labors as a prairie housewife and minister’s wife were apparently quite demanding and exhausting.
Themes
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John’s wife was startled when he suggested that she skip the ironing on a Sunday night, but she wanted to learn the Sabbath customs. Nowadays she reads and studies on Sunday night, copying out facts and poems for her son’s sake. She is trying to like John Donne in particular. One day she went to the public library and brought home a copy of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which she devoured. John read the book back when it was popular, but he didn’t care for it.
Thinking of his mother’s tendency to burn the Sunday dinner reminds John of his wife’s very different background. Usually, a devout Christian family of John’s day would avoid heavy chores on Sunday, or the Sabbath, but Lila wasn’t raised this way. It’s clear, though, that carrying on these customs is important to her for their son’s sake. She’s even trying to pick up some of John’s literary, tastes such as Donne, but she prefers popular Westerns like John Fox, Jr.’s 1908 romance.
Themes
When John was a young boy, he heard of a murder out in the country, when a farmer was attacked with a knife. The knife got thrown into the river. But no suspect was ever charged, though rumors swirled now and then. John always worried about this because once he helped his father throw a pistol into the river. His grandfather had gotten the gun in Kansas, and they found it among his possessions after he died. John was fascinated, but his father was disgusted.
The transition to this boyhood memory is rather abrupt, but it might be prompted by the plot of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which involves feuding Appalachian families. John grew up knowing that brutal murders sometimes happened and that their perpetrators were never found. So, his grandfather’s mysterious gun tapped into this awareness of the frontier history of violence and vigilantism.
Themes
John’s father buried the gun, some old shirts, and some sermons in a deep hole, but weeks later, he dug everything up again. He tried to smash the pistol with a maul, then put the pieces into a sack and flung it all into the river. Then John’s mother washed the shirts by hand and ironed them until they looked almost as good as new. Then she buried them. John wonders if anything is left of the shirts and thinks it would have been more respectful to burn them.
John’s father seemed much more troubled by his father’s past than John himself did—tormented, in fact, as shown by the fact that he couldn’t let his father’s things rest in the ground and then tried to destroy what remained. Recall that John has always associated his grandfather with fire; he seems to think it would’ve been more suited to his grandfather’s personality to set his effects on fire than to piously bury them.
Themes
Once John asked his father if his grandfather had done something wrong, and his father said that God would be the judge of that. John believed there must have been a crime involved. He has an old photograph of his grandfather looking wild-haired and angry at the camera. But John notes that even the best life contains enough guilt to account for such a look. And John figures that by helping hide the evidence, he’s always been implicated in whatever his grandfather did.
The Ames family legacy was filled with secrecy, which owes much to the fact that John’s father was uncomfortable with how his father chose to practice his convictions. His father’s silence left John with questions, but he chooses not to speculate, suggesting that even good people are guilty of something, or are at least implicated in others’ guilt.
Themes
After the murder took place in John’s neighborhood, children were scared to do the milking in the dark. Rumors flew for many years about where the killer might be hiding, and the story kept changing. For all John knows, kids are still telling that story. But he assures his son that if he or Tobias hears the story, the villain must be past 100 by this time.
John shifts back to the mysterious murder that kids have told stories about for generations. Even though that particular murderer no longer poses a threat to anyone, John implies that his story expresses universal human fears. Its haunting vagueness is associated in his mind with his grandfather’s unnamed actions.
Themes
