Questionings And Fantasies Of Rachel example essay topic

Rachel often addresses her thoughts to God. How does she imagine Him (He ror It)? Does Rachel's concept of God change during the course of the Novel? Explain.

Rachel Cameron, the heroine of 'A Jest of God', is not simply as an individual literary character but as a psychological portrayal of women of Rachel's time and inclination. Even we can easily find someone who has the same problem Rachel has in the friends of us, or maybe in an early morning when we get up; stand at front of the mirror; we will suddenly have a idea, 'I am Rachel too.'s he has a common Cameron heritage. She is a gawky, introverted spinster schoolteacher who has returned home to Manawaka from university in Winnipeg, upon the death of her alcoholic undertaker father Niall Cameron, to care for her hypochondriac mother May. Nevertheless, the family resemblance is obvious: their shared Scots Presbyterian ancestry, which Laurence views as distinctively Canadian, provides an armour of pride that imprisons her within their internal worlds, while providing a defence against the external world.

To overcome that barrier between personalities, she must learn to understand and accept their heritage in order to liberate her own identities and free herself for the future. She must also learn to love herself before she can love others. Rachel receive a sentimental education through a brief love affair: as a result of learning to empathize with their lovers, she learn to love herself and the people she lives with. Laurence's emphasis is, as always, on the importance of love in the sense of compassion, as each of her solipsistic protagonists develops from claustrophobia to community. The beginning of 'A Jest of God' extends beyond its Canadian perimeters in Rachel's branching imagination, both into the fairytale dream world which gives depth and pathos to the disappointment and despair of her present and out into a wider world in time and space than the grey little town of Manawaka. The first lines of the novel tell us everything basic to Rachel's mind, her temperament, and her situation.

The wind blows low, the wind blows high The snow comes falling from the sky, Rachel Cameron says she " ll die For the want of the golden city. She is handsome, she is pretty, She is the queen of the golden city. They are not actually chanting my name, of course, I only hear it that way from where I am watching the classroom window, because I remember myself skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago... (p. 1) The reader is engaged in sympathy with Rachel by the sadness of the gap between her dream-self, 'Queen of the Golden City,' and her reality, shut in behind her classroom window, looking out and worrying about becoming an eccentric spinster, that stereotyped butt of cruel laughter.

But were also engaged by the range and the quality of Rachel's imagination -- and it is this, continuing through the book, that holds our sympathy, our interest, and our increasing respect. The golden city is at first the dream world of Rachel's sexual fantasies where she and her prince live happily ever after; later in the novel it becomes identified with the golden city of Jerusalem reinterpreted as the growth of the spirit within the individual, a new dispensation which makes it possible for her to goon living, if not happily ever after, at least affirmatively. Rachel makes a double journey. She is just thirty-four, a frustrated spinster, outwardly in bondage to her marcelled, blue-rinsed, anxious, and superficial mother, but actually in bondage was braking of proper appearances as set up in her own mind by Manawaka and its expectations.

She is afraid of life and death hangs over her always, especially symbolized by her dead father's vocation, undertaking, and by the presence underneath her home of the undertaking establishment that had been her father's. She makes a journey into her own mind and personality, and finally she dares to act upon what she finds there. 'A Jest of God " is a record of a tortured but unremittingly honest journey of self-analysis and self-therapy. (George Bowe ring, 'That Fool of a Fear') It is both complicated and daring, in terms of the novelist's techniques. The present, the past, the questionings and fantasies of Rachel are all woven together instead of being completely separated and counterpointed as in the former work. All the strands come together in the aftermath of her affair with Nick Kaz lik.

Rachel is symbolically biblical in her " mourning for her children,' the children she has never had. Nick is real to Rachel as a lover, and yet she needs him more urgently as a father for her children than as a lover. She cannot understand the depth of Nick " sown problem as the son of a Ukranian immigrant and as the child who cannot do for his parents what Steve, his dead brother, would have done (Class Notes). Steve would have preserved the land that Nestor Kazlikloved and would have given himself to it; Nick cannot. If we try to compare 'A Jest of God' with the Bible, there are lots of interesting things we can find. Just as Rachel is associated with Jerusalem and the golden city, so Nick is identified with the prince of romance and with the Israelites. ('a hidden Caucasian face, one of the hawkish and long-ago riders of the Steppes.

' Characteristically, his first kiss is absorbed back into her fantasy world; 'It's unreal, anyway. If it isn't happening, one might as well do what one wants. ' Yet this encounter does function as the prince's kiss of fairy tale and Rachel's affair with Nick marks the beginning of her transition to the real world.) Describing his family he states explicitly; 'I have forsaken my house -- I have left mine heritage -- mine heritage is unto me as a lion in the forest -- it crie th out against me -- therefore have I hated it'. Because a Jacob-Esau relationship is implied to exist between Nick and his dead brother and because Rachel's speech, 'If I had a child I would like it to be yours,' is immediately followed by the words of Rachel of Genesis:' Give me my children,' Nick is identified as a Jacob figure.

Ironically, however, the character of Nick is dual in aspect; he is both the bringer of gifts that his name implies (St. Nicholas) but also one of the devil's party (Class Notes). Identified with the shadow prince of Rachel's dreams, he carries with him an inheritance of death and so cannot make a covenant of the spirit with Rachel. Nick understands Rachel better than she understands him. When he says,' I'm not God, I cannot solve anything,' and produces the photo graph of young boy. This particular detail, together with Nick's indictment of his father: 'It's this fantastic way he has, of creating the world in his own image,' and Rachel's concurrent realization: 'Have I finished with facades?' all strongly suggest the thematic that Rachel does finish with her false self to go on as an authentic person, and we can see step by stay she find her God, but Nick (whose past almost exactly parallels Rachel's), is still tied to his own false God, his image of himself as child and his relation to his dead brother.

We know the depth of Nick's meaning, but at this moment, Rachel still has to learn it, painfully. She does not lose Nick, because she never had him in any committed sense (Class Notes), and she does not bear his child as she had hoped and feared she would do. Instead she is humiliated and taunted by the irony of knowing that the growth within her was not life but a kind of random nothingness, a benign tumor. Through the pain of the emotional and physical ordeals, however, she does learn to accept and to live with her limitations and with life's.

As Nick could not be God for her, so she cannot, need not, and must not be God for her mother. Her choices are human and humanly limited, but she does have choices and she makes one of them -- the decision to move. She is no longer afraid to leave Manawaka, for she is no longer dependent on her fear of the town for a kind of tortured security of identity. She is free at least to the point of knowing that Manawaka is with her forever, both its strength and its constraints. These she will always carry within her to deal with as she is able. Rachel was looking for an Old Testament's patriarch God, a father-figure who would direct and protect her, and she was also looking for a New Testament's Christ who would redeem her.

She moves finally to a reliance on whatever strength she can find or forge within herself. I will walk by myself on the shore of the sea and look at the free gulls flying. I will grow too orderly, plumping up the chesterfield cushions just-so before I go to bed... I will ask myself if I am going mad, but if I do, I won't know it. God's mercy on reluctant jesters. God's grace on fools.

God's pity on God (p. 202). At the end of the novel, Rachel recognizes the irony of her condition but she also asserts that the jest of god which had given her a tumor instead of the desperately wanted child has been a 'beau gest e' resulting in the birth of a new spirit, the New Testament dispensation of Christ's grace,' God's mercy on God'. It is very clear, that a step-by-step journey into the self.