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
Speaking of visions, John remembers that when he was a young child, his father helped tear down a Baptist church building that had been struck by lightning and burned. He remembers playing with other small boys while watching the men search through the rubble, and everyone singing while they worked in the warm rain. He remembers eating a biscuit that had soot on it and thinking of “the bread of affliction,” a phrase that’s not used too often these days.
Earlier, John remarked that memories can be a kind of “vision,” and this childhood memory seems to be one such vision for him. It includes two kinds of imagery that are important for John—fire and water—symbolic of God’s power and grace. The presence of soot on the biscuit evokes God’s fiery power, too, and the biscuit’s association with “affliction” suggests that even through destructive things like fire, God can kindle new life.
Themes
Sometimes, late at night, John loses track of his surroundings and thinks he’s back in those harder times, and “there’s a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand.” He says that his point is that we never understand “the actual nature even of your own experience.” This memory seems to sum up John’s life somehow, when he “took communion” from his father’s soot-stained hand. That memorable day put “many things […] altogether beyond question” for John.
This memory is foundational for John’s life and beliefs in ways he can’t articulate. He suggests that people don’t always understand things while they’re happening, but that their meaning becomes clearer over time. The sooty bread, for instance, wasn’t actually part of a communion ritual, but looking back, its solemn significance, what it taught him about affliction, make it seem as if it was.
Themes
The family was always careful about approaching his grandfather from his right side—the side with the missing eye—since that seemed to be where his visions came from. Sometimes John would come home from school and his mother would warn him, “The Lord is in the parlor,” and he’d peek into the other room to see his grandfather looking “sociable and gravely pleased,” while making occasional remarks to his unseen guest. One day he said the Lord had suggested that he “just go home and be old.” Later, John’s father said he didn’t think there was anything they could have done to dissuade his father from going to Kansas, but John doubts that he really believed that.
Even though John has made peace with his grandfather’s legacy and with his own ideas about visions, his grandfather’s visions really were quite strange. Here, his grandfather believed that he received literal visits from the Lord. Such visions are out of place in a parsonage parlor, to say the least, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that John’s grandfather ultimately decided to retire to Kansas, the place where he felt at home. But that doesn’t change the fact that father-son tensions contributed to his father’s departure.
Themes
One day while walking to school, John saw some kids teasing his grandfather while he was picking blackberries, tugging on his coat and running away. While John stood there trying to decide what to do, his grandfather suddenly whirled around and stared at him, and John felt like a betrayer. John admits that he did feel some embarrassment about his grandfather, and his grandfather knew it but didn’t give him any credit for trying to be better. He adds that they were all hurt by his grandfather’s departure; they knew it was a judgment.
The other kids saw John’s grandfather as a pitiful old eccentric, and to some extent, John felt the same way. But he did love and respect his grandfather, and his grandfather’s decision to leave Gilead felt like a message that in his grandfather’s eyes, the rest of the family wasn’t any better than the mocking, clueless locals.
Themes
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