Representation of the Article “A Father’s Faith”
In “A Father’s Faith”, Miriam Toews describes the story of a family and its relation to religion and community rules. Its distinctive feature and the main topic is the possibility to combine various attitudes towards the same place and people and find out the meaning of life. Being a mature teacher, a good husband, and a kind father, Mel Toews is still under a serious threat because “if life doesn’t make sense you lose yourself in it, your spirit decays” (Toews 113).
At the same time, the family continues living in the same town and being good representatives of the Mennonite community where everyone knows the history and roots of each other. The problem is that despite complaints, depression, and ambiguous thoughts where “the world was sad and unsafe place for him”, the father of the family believes that “his town provided shelter from it” (Toews 114). Mel tries to underline the benefits of this life so his children could understand the worth of this life and enjoy it the way he did it.
In this story, the narrator covers different periods of life and says that human experience is the best barometer of relationships. With every new paragraph, I discover significant and controversial elements for people to rely on in their intentions to be happy and satisfied with their choices. Mel liked the idea that “teaching school – helping others make sense of the world – was a good profession for a man who was continuously struggling to find meaning in life” (Toews 113). However, he was depressed as he was “living in that freaky, austere place where this world isn’t good enough” (Toews 113). Such description proves a contradiction of thoughts that cannot be avoided even in a perfect world with a life full of sense, emotions, and responsibilities.
Conceptual Relationship Between “Intoxicated by My Illness” and “A Father’s Faith”
It seems that the conceptual relationship between “Intoxicated by My Illness” and “A Father’s Faith” lies on the surface. In both essays, the authors discuss the life, its meaning for different people, and the choices that have to be made under certain conditions before their deaths. However, the ways used by Toews in her “A Father’s Faith” and Broyard in his “Intoxicated by My Illness” vary considerably turning the former as a perfect conceptual respond to the latter.
Broyard introduced the world where a person accepts the fact of being dying and discovers only the best moments in order to inspire his family and his friends. Toews, in her turn, focuses on the details that make life unpredictable and not always happy, thus contributing to the vision of the previous author. The conceptual relationship between the stories of Broyard and Toews should not be limited to the meaning of life but expanded to the feeling of inevitability that is depicted in different ways, the intentions to enjoy the present, and the connection with a family as the major gift.
In both texts, the main characters experience the feeling of inevitability because of different reasons. The primary text for analysis introduces the story of a man who has to live with an untreated cancer diagnosis and establish “a tacit agreement between my body and my brain” (Broyard 3). His problem is not just to accept the fact but learn how to live and not to become a burden but an inspiration for the people around.
Toews does not use awareness of death as a solution or motivation. He depicts a town as a symbol of salvation for all people regardless of their true feelings and the idea that “every family had a secret” (Toews 112). In both stories, the inevitability of death is a core feature, but compared to Broyard who describes the reasons for living, Toews supposes that the methods and approaches to living play a more crucial role.
The common attribute of “Intoxicated by My Illness” and “A Father’s Faith” is the role of a family and the necessity to live in the present. However, Broyard describes the importance of human relationships at this moment because of being “given a real deadline at last” (3). Toews explains the same relationships from the past-tense perspective when the father told “sometimes in tears, that he loved me very much and that he wished he were a better father, that he were involved in my life” (113). In other words, the lens text helps identify the mistakes of people who fail to accept the rules established in the primary text. However, this decision cannot be defined as a purely right or wrong, it is just one of the possible ways people find interesting or important to follow.
In general, there are a number of mutual concepts in the essays written by Broyard and Toews. Still, it would be a mistake to consider these two texts as similar. The authors initiate their own interpretations of human existence with all its pros and cons, threats and challenges, benefits and happiness. Broyard wants to show a new way of living when a specific deadline cannot be avoided, and Toews explains what can happen if no changes occur during the entire life. Their visions are similar and different in a unique way, the way that helps the reader realize how exquisite the line between satisfaction and frustration or life and death could be.
Research Question
Are such elements of life as a family, work, satisfaction, and discovery enough for people to find the meaning of life?
Works Cited
- Broyard, Anatole. Intoxicated by My Illness: And Other Writings on Life and Death. Fawcett Columbine, 1992.
- Toews, Miriam. A Father’s Faith. Web.