과거와 현재의 교차로인 길리아드—마릴린 로빈슨의 『길리아드』

Abstract

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, published in 2004 and awarded Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, deals with the stories a 77-year-old dying minister tells in his letter to his 7-year-old son. It is a mixture of personal memories and public history, a mixture of fact and fiction, covering the era between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century. The protagonist John Ames calmy describes the major events in American history and weaves them with the personal memories of how his grandfather and father had reacted to the same events and what consequences their different reactions have brought to him and his family so far. The core of all the difficulties and conflicts within his family is how to apply religious teachings to race problem, which still haunts American society in the modern age. In developing the stories, Robinson deliberately set the spatial setting in a fictional city of Gilead which is based on the real city of Tabor in Iowa. Located in midwestern, this fictional city is on crossroads where different ideas collide and, like other nameless midwestern settlers' town, is soon forgotten from people's memory despite its glorious campaign and numerous anonymous heroes. Through family conflicts between and among generations, Robinson tries to retrieve the past which is painful and thus ignored by American public. Yet, Robinson casts a seed for hope to cure the deep-rooted agonies in the end by having John Ames and his godson Jack Boughton reconcile through mutual understanding. Ames's nameless son is implied to perform the final task of healing the wound if he grows up to be a brave man in a brave country.