Gilead Themes

Gilead is made up of 76-year-old John Ames’s letters, an attempt to leave a record for his young son. On one level, John tries to prepare his son for his death, which will inevitably happen before the boy is very old. He comforts himself and his son with the belief that life after death is a state of being “more alive than I have ever been.” And yet that doesn’t mean one should…

John Ames comes from a long line of Christian ministers, including his father and grandfather, and he says that this vocation came naturally to him. Yet he doesn’t take his duties for granted. He often muses on his work’s “privileges”—like getting to bless other human beings, which he sees as affirming their God-given sacredness, a beautiful thing to experience. And even though John has never seriously doubted his beliefs the way other characters do…

Gilead is a story of strife between fathers and sons: John’s grandfather and father fought bitterly over war and pacifism, John’s best friend Boughton is estranged from his troubled son Jack, and John himself struggles to love Jack, who’s a kind of honorary son to him. To deal with his regret over the estrangement with John’s grandfather, John’s father goes on a long, difficult pilgrimage through the Kansas countryside in search of John’s…

Most of John’s life has been marked by loneliness, ever since his first wife and child died 50 years ago. He regards those lonely decades as his “dark time,” a “long, bitter prayer.” There’s an added bitterness for John in that, as a minister, he spent much of his life guiding other people through milestones like births and marriages, yet those very experiences seemed closed off to him; he was even jealous of big…