Summary pp 144-192

Ames and his son walk over to Boughton’s to return the magazine he borrowed with an interesting
article about Americans and religion in it from several years back.

Ames acknowledges that two insidious notions about Christianity are that religion and religious
experiences are illusions, or that religion is real and one’s participation in it is an illusion; he finds
the latter more problematic.

He and Boughton discuss their thoughts on heaven. Jack comes and sits with them; it is the first
time Ames has seen him since the Sunday service and it seems a little awkward. Glory comes by
and Ames notes how happy she is. He realises he may be too hard on Jack, for it is a good thing
he came home to his family. He is ashamed.

Lila stops in to tell him dinner is ready, and sits down to join them for a bit, which she does not
often do. He thinks about how she used to speak improperly and how he loved it, but once
Boughton corrected her and he thinks she is insecure now. She used to say “it don’t matter.”

Jack asks Ames for his thoughts on predestination, which Ames admits frankly is one of his least
favourite topics. He says that there are many attributes of God and humans do not understand all
of them, but he does not like the word. Glory and Boughton are visibly annoyed by the
conversation. Jack asks if some people will be born to evil lives and then go to hell, to which Ames
responds that a person’s behaviour tends to be consistent with his nature, but only his behaviour is
consistent. People can change if there is another factor involved. He says there are things he just
does not understand and will not force a theory on a mystery.

His wife can see he is getting upset and speaks up, asking if people can’t change what the point of
getting saved is. Jack smiles and mentions that his father and Ames should be interested in this
question and he knows they have been to the Methodists’ tent meetings, but then he stops. Ames’s
wife encourages him to continue. She says quietly that people can change, and everything can
change. The conversation ends.

On the way home, his wife says Jack was just asking a question, and that maybe not everyone is
comfortable with themselves. Ames understands this to be a rebuke. He does not like talking about
the faith with people who have no sympathy for it. However, defensiveness is not ideal.
Sleep is elusive and gruelling for Ames.

He knows there are bonds that oblige him to be tolerant and kind to Jack Boughton, and it hurts to
bear witness against him. However, the story must be told. Ames begins and says when Jack was
about twenty and in college he became involved with a young, very poor woman. She conceived a
child but he never acknowledged it or provisioned it. At times Boughton, his wife, Glory, and even
Ames went out to see it but he did not. They brought clothes and left money but the woman and
the family were proud and spiteful. It was very hard on the Boughton family. When the child was
three she cut her foot and died from an infection.

When his mother died Jack did not come home, perhaps because he wanted to spare his family.
The baby had looked just like him. Now things seem fine, and Ames wonder what sort of
reconciliation everyone worked out.

Ames found a couple of old sermons, one on forgiveness. People are forgiven, but they must also
forgive as well. He remembers when he and Glory went out to see the young woman and the baby
one time. They did not get close on account of the hostility, but watched the two play. The young
woman was mean and mocking towards the child. Glory sadly said she understood nothing of the
world. That sermon on forgiveness leads Ames to think of Jack, and he does not know how he
would even begin to forgive the man.
Tobias and Ames’s son are playing and Jack comes over with his bat and glove. Ames sees that
there is something on the man’s mind and goes to speak to him. Jack asks if he will be in his study
at church tomorrow and Ames says he will be in the morning.

Ames believes that we must be in adulthood in Paradise, and that heaven is probably what
Boughton suggested it was: “the best pleasure of this world” (166).

Ames wakes up and puts more care into his appearance, realising there is a fine line between a
gentleman and a codger; he wants to do right by his lovely young wife.

He is sleeping sitting up in a pew when young Boughton finds him. He is a bit embarrassed but
glad that Jack allows him to collect himself. They have a few awkward starts to the conversation
but Ames says they should try again. Jack tries to ask why he cannot believe the things his father
says, and Ames does not know. He turns the conversation to what he had heard, that there was
once a coloured regiment in the area during the Civil War. Ames says there were once Negro
families who lived in Gilead but they had since moved away.

Jack asks about Karl Barth and Ames is irritated. He also asks if Ames ever wonders why
Christianity always seems to wait for thinking to be done elsewhere and Ames responds no, even
though he has thought that himself. He thinks Jack is “winning” the conversation, but the young
man does not seem happy about it.

Ames is frustrated and although he speaks of Barth’s wrongness, tears come to his eyes. Jack is
profoundly sorry and sadly leaves. Ames is embarrassed and wonders if he ought to write Jack a
letter.

He thinks of his grandfather again, whom he admits he did not really like to be around. The old
man’s eye always seemed full of disappointment. He grew very eccentric as well, and Ames
remembers one time when the mayor asked him, as a veteran and elderly member of the town, to
speak for Fourth of July. The family was nervous. The speech was brief and bleak, and spoke of
visions and Gilead as being a place of dust now. Not very many people seemed to be paying much
attention.

Ames does not enjoy arguing with people over religion or furnishing “proofs,” and cautions his son
not to look for them because they are “impertinent” and “are never sufficient to the question” (179).
It is strange to him to feel grief and illness in the same organ: his heart.

He hears his wife and Jack talking on the porch. Jack gives her a letter to give to him, which is
short, and says he will not trouble him again. His wife looks sorry for both of them. Ames sends a
note back with her saying he ought to be the one apologising, but his health is bad and he hopes
they can speak again soon.

He remembers Jack as a child, a child who loved pranks and causing mischief but always seemed
so lonely. He even used to steal small things, but only things that mattered to the people from
whom he stole. As a teenager his transgressions were a little more problematic but since his family
was well respected he got away with them. Now Ames would describe him as lonely, as well as
angry and weary. He feels like he can’t judge him like other men but finds him simply mean.

It is Ames’s birthday and he has candles in his pancakes. It is a sweet, lovely day. He is seventy-
seven. The family goes on a birthday jaunt and Jack is not there. Glory makes an excuse for him.
Ames writes another note and takes it over to the mailbox himself. Jack is outside and comes up to
him nervously. It does not seem like he read the first note, probably fearing a rebuke, and he is
happy to hear Ames tell him it is a sincere apology. They agree to talk and Ames feels a weight off
his chest.

He remembers how Boughton surprised him on the morning of Jack’s baptism as a baby by saying
his name was to be John Ames instead of Theodore Dwight Weld. This was so emotional and
unlike Boughton. Ames had felt strange and cold, and wondered if he had never been able to warm
to the child and feels a burden of guilt about it.

Now, though, as he writes it out he realizes it is not true. John Ames Boughton is his son—he is
“another self, a more cherished self” (189).

He still wonders about the feelings he has that Jack might harm his wife and son just because he
can.

He feels now as if he had never been lost before, that his wanderings to the limits of his
understanding are unmatched by what he is thinking now. His new bewilderments are new
territory.

Analysis pp.144-192

This is a difficult section, one that includes musings on theology, the painful and complicated
backstory of Jack Boughton, and awkward and disappointing conversations between Ames and
Jack as Ames tries to work through his feelings regarding the man.

Here Robinson engages with Calvin and idea with which he is most commonly associated—
predestination—giving voice to her own beliefs about the faith. Critic Todd Shy looks at Robinson’s
religion in his article on the novel and her book of essays, The Death of Adam. He notes how
Robinson believes Calvin is the most important American religious influence we have, and that her
view of this is “Calvinism stretched and moulded to humanist purposes”; she most admires “the
grandeur of his vision of what God intends for humanity. It is the ‘elegance’ and ‘gallantry’ of his
moral vision, not his orthodox precision that she extols.”

Shy believes that Calvin might not approve of her “modern” approach to his theology, though, as
she seeks to “shift attention away from the majestic heights of Calvin-style revelation to the local
authenticity of the individual”, as seen in John Ames. Her writing is cognisant of modern priorities
of social justice and “ethics to thrones formally occupied by less concrete debates.” John Ames is
more concerned with wisdom and presence rather than metaphysics, and “apprehension rather
than revelation.” Ames is rooted in the world, and what Robinson wants to stress most about him
and Jack is their humanity. When Ames finally sees Jack as a sort of son, this is complete. Overall,
then, Shy writes that the novel “embodies Christian humanism rather than Reformation faith.”

Jack’s backstory now being revealed, the reader must decide whether or not they find him a
sympathetic character. As the narrative of his childhood and his treatment of the young woman and
their child unfolds, it is clear that we are not supposed to be sure how exactly we feel. Jack’s
actions with the young woman are reprehensible, but he was a young man who made a mistake
and seems to have paid for it the rest of his life. As a child Jack was mischievous and a tad cruel,
but he was also a lonely child who never quite fit in. His siblings went on to accomplishment and
prosperity, but Jack could never quite make something of himself. When Ames reveals what is
going on with Jack right now Jack gains our sympathy even more.

As for Ames, though, he is still working through his feelings for Jack. He does seem to have an
epiphany toward the end of the section, however. He admits to his son that he had never felt close
to the child, not even from the day of its baptism when his own name was bestowed upon it, and
wondered that “the child felt how coldly I went about his christening, how far my thoughts were
from blessing him…I do feel a burden of guilt toward that child, that man, my namesake. I have
never been able to warm to him, never” (188). After he writes these thoughts down, he realises
they are not true, that he allowed his own jealousy and misery about his life to colour his thoughts
toward the child but that he certainly does not hate him and actually considers him “my son… By
‘my son’ I mean another self, a more cherished self” (189). This does not mean that Ames is fully
ready to embrace Jack, especially since he does not know the true story of what is going on with
him and mentions that if Jack ever hurt his family “I’m afraid theology would fail me” (190), but this
is certainly progress.

Summary pp 192-282

One quiet night, Ames joins his wife and son on the porch. It is a pleasant evening. Jack walks by
in the dark and Ames’s wife joins them. Ames says he is a great comfort here to his father. Lila
takes his son inside to bed. Ames says he is impressed Jack knows Karl Barth and Jacks laughs
and says he tries to crack the code but Ames would be wary of his motives.
Lila comes out with cider and sits. Ames feels like Jack is a son returned home to peace. He
reflects that everyone has “a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a
separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilisation built on the ruins of any number
of preceding civilisations” (197).

Ames appears to have nodded off but he was still awake. Jack and Lila talk quietly, comfortably.
He says he is restless and will probably be going back to St. Louis. She said it took awhile to get
comfortable here but he replies that the opposite is the problem: it is like returning to the scene of
the crime. She says people speak highly of him and he wonders if Ames warned her. She says
Ames never speaks unkindly of him. He says he was always wary of a settled life and she says it
was all she ever wanted.

Ames lies awake and thinks of this. He is amazed Jack is so surprised that Ames did not warn Lila,
like he’d been negligent. He wishes he could smooth Jack’s brow and calm away guilt and regret to
see what he is dealing with, but this is not theologically acceptable.

He starts to feel a little guilty that he is not speaking to his son as much in these words as writing
out what he is struggling with.

He tells the story of his relationship with Lila. She came to church one day and he noticed her and
hoped she would come back. He did not know if she was married and she looked young, so he
could not admit his feelings. For the first time in his life he “felt I could be snatched out of my
character, my calling, my reputation, as if they could just fall away like a dry husk” (205).

He began to look for her on Sundays and hoped his sermons would impress and please her. One
Sunday she was not there, and he felt so dull, so terrible, and so sad. He missed her like she was
the only friend he had. She returned the following Sunday. Boughton smiled at his attempts to look
more polished. She came to him and asked him to baptise her and he agreed. They spent time
learning the doctrines of the faith and he baptised her. He was always aware of her youth and
never behaved in an untoward fashion. He wished he did not have to be secretive and decorous.

The women would come to his house and perform small tasks, and one day Lila came. He asked
how he could repay her and she said he ought to marry her. He did.

Glory comes over and takes Lila and his son to the movies. She has Boughton with her, which is
odd since he rarely leaves the house. He sits quietly with Ames and they listen to the radio. He
suddenly says Jack is not right with himself yet, and he does not know what was going on with his
life. Ames privately thinks he ought to speak with Lila.

Jack comes to Ames’s house and seems surprised to see his father there. He sits with them. He
seems aware of the conversation’s tenor and has a perceptive smile. Boughton nods off. Ames is
frustrated he has to seem dishonest about what they were talking about, and their conversation is
forced.

Later Ames prays, struck by Jack’s sadness. Ames suddenly and succinctly writes, “Jack Boughton
has a wife and a child” (217), and begins to tell what happened. Jack came by when he was at the
church sorting papers. He looked a little unkempt but had shaved, and Ames admitted he was
interested to see him. They sit and talk. Jack says he was surprised to come home and find his
father so old, and that he cannot tell him what is going on. He pulls put a photograph of himself
with an African American woman and a young boy –it is his family.

He explains that it was difficult for the woman’s family. They are married in the eyes of God but not
officially. Her father is a minister and does not want them to marry. They spend time apart because
she and the boy often go back to Tennessee to be with her family, which pains him. He says that
the father does not like him because he is an atheist, to which Ames asks if that is true. Jack says
he is “in a state of categorical unbelief” (220) rather than anything else.

He has not had word from his wife since he left St. Louis and is waiting to hear from her. He tells
the story of how they met. She was a teacher and was walking home in a rainstorm and dropped
her papers, and he stopped to help her and she said thank you Reverend. He pauses and says
that if they could find a way to live he thinks she would marry him.

Della, the young woman, was always nice to him and invited him over to have tea with her and her
roommate. He told her he was not a reverend. They had Thanksgiving dinner together as well. She
was mad that he had been drinking but was kind to him. They behaved respectably but her sister
got wind and came out from Tennessee to watch over her. When the school year was over her
brothers came and took her home. He went to the church where her father preached to find her.
His white skin made him stand out and her father insisted if he were an honourable man he would
leave her alone. He decided to do that because he saw how good her life was.

In the fall they ran into each other and he tipped her hat to her and she burst into tears; this was
when they considered themselves married. Della became pregnant and the school dismissed her.
Jack could barely provide for her so her father and brother convinced him to let her go and stay
with them. He was relieved because he felt terrible that he could not provide for her. He said he’d
come to Memphis when he could save up enough money. He had to write to his father to get
enough to pay off debts.

He finally went to her and the baby had been born the day before. He spoke with Della’s father,
who thought he was descended from John Ames, the great abolitionist. Jack let this pass since he
thought it might help him. He sat with Della but knew he had to go find a job. He left her and went
to find work in St. Louis.

Now Della and their son, Robert Boughton Miles, go back and forth. He is lovely boy and wants for
nothing. Jack has had difficulty with work and things continue to go poorly for him. He loves his
bright and beautiful son, who wants to be a preacher. He wishes he could introduce him to his own
father but thinks it might kill the old man.

He notes that Ames has made an unconventional marriage himself—alluding to Lila’s age—which
annoys Ames, but then Jack immediately looks weary and regretful.

Before he leaves, downhearted and tired, he rests his head on Ames’s shoulder for a moment.
Ames feels the loneliness and that he ought to be like a second father to the boy. He tells him he is
a good man. Jack asks hopefully if he might live here with his wife to avoid the anti-miscegenation
laws of other places. Ames says he does not know about people here. Jack says sadly it does not
matter because he has lost them anyway. He leaves. Ames prays, wondering why he wrote this all
out for his son but then concluding, “he is a man about whom you may never hear one good word,
and I just don’t know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him” (232).

Ames reflects on the tragedies of his lifetime, such as war and Depression, and wishes people
would think about what the Lord wants them to understand.
He writes of his father and mother who lived near the Gulf Coast in a cottage Edward built for
them. They only came back twice to visit, once when Louisa was lost and once to talk him into
leaving. He never wanted to even though his father and Edward wanted him to have broader life
experience. He felt that he was not a fool and resented that he was not assumed to be able to
invest his loyalties where he saw fit.
Ames goes to Jack and tries to give him a bit of money, but this seems to offend. He says he got
the letter he was waiting for and is leaving. Glory is angry and Boughton is miserable. Ames thinks
about the situation, knowing that all the other successful children will be coming home and filling
the house to be with their father and grandfather in his time of passing. He knows that Boughton
would abandon them all for that one lonely son, extravagantly giving him love. He wishes he could
see that happen. Ames understands why Jack cannot be around all that.

He says goodbye to him before he goes and notes that he looks older than young, but also elegant
and brave. He gives him a book and preaches at him a bit. They walk and Ames tells him he
understands why he is leaving. He allows Ames to give him a little bit of money. Ames says he
would like to bless Jack, and Jack agrees. He puts his hand on Jack’s head and blesses him, and
Jack looks as if he does not believe the things Ames says. They say goodbye.

Ames rests inside the quiet church and thinks about how Jack invested hope in coming here but
then had to relinquish it.

Boughton’s family is all in town but not the son he wants most. Ames wishes he could tell him of
the benediction but knows he cannot. He sees his friend is almost gone from this mortal world and
he wishes he could help resolve part of the “great mystery” (278) for him. He tells his sleeping
friend that he blessed his boy, can feel the weight of his brow, and that he loves him as much as
Boughton always meant him to.

He thinks he ought to have his old sermons burned.

The beauty of the prairie astounds him, and its lack of adornment seems Christ-like. He loves this
town, and dying here would be “the last wild gesture of love” (282).

He prays his son will “grow up a brave man in a brave country” (282). Now he will pray, and then
sleep.

Analysis pp. 192-282

The novel ends in a manner that befits its general content, style, and themes: it is a quiet, soft, and
sweet end in which Ames thinks of his son growing up without him, and then that he must pray and
rest. This end is anticlimactic in the sense that Ames does not die, as some readers may have
expected, or feature Ames’s son picking up the narrative. There is very little closure at all –no
closure regarding Ames’s death, Boughton’s death, and what will happen to Jack Boughton in
terms of his reunion with his family and answers to questions such as his ability to provide for them
and live with them. However, this is appropriate given the overall structure of the narrative, as
Ames tells a meandering yet thoughtful story of his life, current preoccupations, and advice for his
son without much organisation or hierarchy.

Ames’s letter to his son his major way of working through the problematic father-son relationships
he has experienced in his life. He is able to do this because he is at the end of his life; his dying, as
critic Laura E. Tanner asserts in her insightful article on the novel, “shapes the sensory and
psychological dynamics of human perception.” In his memory, moments of interaction between
father and son “mark the intermingling of emotion and perception”; the moment with the biscuit and
ash is particularly important, for “the spiritual significance of the moment remains inextricable from
its emotional and perceptual immediacy.” Emotion and sensation are tied together indelibly.
Throughout the novel Ames grapples with the “anticipated loss” through his focus and his powers
of perception. He may feel a degree of comfort that he will have an afterlife, but this heightens his
sense of an anticipated absence because it will be as if he is looking on from beyond the grave.

Ames turns his attention to the immediate, to the temporal, to the physical. Tanner references
studies done by scientists that suggest how age changes a person’s perception of time in that we
“realise time has the dimension of depth as well as duration” (Tanner quoting Berg and Gadow).
People of advanced age tend to have more intense perception and “the biology of ageing and/or
the knowledge of limited time contribute to increased focus and heightened awareness; the
intensity of each act of perception emerges as a compensation for the diminished ability or
opportunity to perceive.”

Ames’s advanced age means that he is now an observer rather than an active participant in life.
Death has bracketed his life and it is impossible for him not to be conscious as well as self-
conscious about everything that happens to him and around him. He feels he is vanishing from the
world, or at least only occupying it “contingently.” Tanner writes that experience now is a “series of
distant perceptions that reflect the ageing subject’s liminal location in a culture of autonomy.” He
feels as if his relationship with time and space is “unraveling” and he is being dispossessed. This is
seen when he admires the young family created by his wife, son, and Jack. It is also seen when
Lila tells their son that he cannot hear them. The most telling example of this absence is when Lila
and Jack talk on the porch while Ames putatively slumbers next to them. He is present but also is
not, and is more of a “pleasureless voyeur granted invisibility by the process of disincarnation that
accompanies illness and old age.” Even though nothing inappropriate happens, it is still a
melancholy and embarrassing moment for Ames. Overall, Tanner suggests “For Ames, the
anticipation of his own absence renders him incapable of dwelling in the present with ease.” His
present is full of grief and loss even if they have not actually happened yet.

While the novel is interlaced with grief, the acceptance Ames is finally able to offer Jack is a joyful
factor. Although readers may have more ease in appreciating Jack’s situation and his essential
humanity, the fact that Ames does get there eventually is notable. It is a comfort for Jack to have
Ames know his true story, to bless him, and to understand why he must leave. Robinson’s book, so
rooted in the lived experience of human beings, asserts that compassion, understanding, and love
are what we must offer to our fellow creatures in order to alleviate the suffering that is a
concomitant of this mortal existence.