![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Wanting to know more about Robinson's fascinating character who struggles with self-loathing, suicidal ideation, a radical doubt that can neither abide God nor quite reject Him either, is both routinely homeless, and regularly identified as a dapper, if disheveled, preacher and prophet. The first time I finished Jack I was stunned. In what ways does this fourth Gilead book change the Gilead series as a whole? Here we begin to address the ways that Jack might help us to more clearly understand the rest of Robinson's Gilead novels, and even potentially some of her nonfiction and Housekeeping. ![]() Thus, this special issue of Christianity & Literature fundamentally asks how Jack has altered our picture of the Gilead novels and indeed the landscape of Robinson's thought. Each new novel reframed the rest, compelling new understandings of characters and concepts presented in different frames and points of view so the reader's sense of the previous novels changed. So, with Lila the world of Gilead expanded and then came Home, a novel from the perspective of Glory and the Boughton family, and finally, Jack, a fourth novel opening more completely the story of the prodigal son Jack Boughton. When she wrote the first novel Gilead it was not clear that we would get a second. Marilynne Robinson's four novels set in and around the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa have each slightly modified how we see the others. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |