Protected values and the meaning of life in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead

Abstract

The paper examines the protected values in Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead (2004). The aim of the study is to show the significance of three major values, namely faith, family and education. It also attempts to suggest how complexly these values interrelate and eventually represent the central tenets of the life worth living. IntroductionAaron Milavec in his paper on the early Christian text the Didache writes: "Any community that cannot artfully and effectively pass on its cherished way of life as a program for divine wisdom and graced existence cannot long endure. Any way of life that cannot be clearly specified, exhibited, and differentiated from the alternative modes operative within the surrounding culture is doomed to growing insignificance and to gradual assimilation" (2003, p. 15). Although Milavec writes about the community of the early Christians whose life circumstances substantially differ from the modern tensions of a culturally globalized world, his observation on the necessity of a spiritual outlook within the wider cultural context as well as his view that culture as a living and changing phenomenon is vital for the existence of any society are still relevant today. While their significance in Ames's story is quite clearly expressed by the narrator, my examination will provide a closer look at their interrelatedness as well as at the ways in which they conceptualize the central tenets of Ames's philosophy of the life worth living. Gilead and the values to live byOne of Gilead's major concerns is the reality of the transience of life. At the very beginning we learn that its protagonist and narrator, the Reverend John Ames, an elderly Congregational pastor in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, has been diagnosed with angina pectoris and knows that he is dying. The first paragraph of his narrative already suggests that coming to terms with approaching death would be one of the central issues of the story: "I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren't very old, as if that settled it" (2004, p.3).Ames's words addressed to his seven-year-old son encapsulate the motivation to write and set a tone which would dominate his later discourses. He uses mild language to tell his son that he is going to die. Knowing the details of the diagnosis, Ames decides to write his child a letter which eventually "becomes a prayer of self-scrutiny, a time capsule of fatherly wisdom, a plainspoken treatise on the difficulty of virtue within the most sincere moral consciousness" (Painter, 2010, p. 325). Meant to express everything that Ames intends to pass down to his son, his "letter" becomes a complex story of the crucial events that shaped Ames's past and shape his present, including the relationship with his beloved wife Lila, best friend Boughton, and his crucial connection wit...