The Resurrection: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Resurrection: Analysis of Major Characters" delves into the lives of several interconnected characters, primarily focusing on James Chandler, a philosophy professor grappling with terminal leukemia. As he reflects on his life and philosophical beliefs, particularly in contrast to contemporary thought, Chandler embodies a blend of idealism and introspection. His wife, Marie, provides a practical counterbalance to his more quixotic nature, while their three daughters represent innocence and the challenges of youthful growth amid adversity.
The narrative also explores the dynamics of Chandler’s family, including his resilient mother, Rose, and the odd Staley sisters, who contribute to a sense of nostalgia and complexity surrounding James’s return to his hometown. Additionally, the character of Viola, a troubled young relative of the Staley sisters, highlights themes of longing and the search for identity within a dysfunctional environment. Lastly, John Horne serves as a contrasting figure to Chandler, showcasing the struggles of despair and detachment in the face of life's challenges. Together, these characters create a rich tapestry that examines life, death, and the quest for meaning in a changing world.
The Resurrection: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: John Gardner
First published: 1966
Genre: Novel
Locale: Batavia, New York
Plot: Metaphysical
Time: Early 1960's
James Chandler, a forty-one-year-old philosophy professor at Stanford University. Influenced by R. G. Collingwood, especially his idea that the process that destroys also creates, Chandler is at odds with the philosophical fashions of his time—positivism and existentialism. This quixotic as well as meditative and usually cheerful academic thus begins writing an “apology for contemporary metaphysics,” then learns that he is suffering from aleukemic leukemia and has only a few months to live. Rather than stay in the hospital in order to prolong his life slightly, he decides to return, with his wife and three daughters, to the hometown he has visited only rarely during the past twenty years, Batavia, in western New York. Batavia, however, has declined or at least changed, as, of course, has Chandler. His disease weakens his body, troubles his sleep (in his dreams, he is unable to protect his children from a strange old woman), and affects his thinking and writing. Desperately, he tries in the little time he has left to work out on paper his insight into Immanuel Kant's mistake, his failure to see the disinterest in moral affirmation. Although he believes that one's goal should be to make life into art, the dying (and still quixotic) Chandler ends up looking like “an image out of some grim, high-class Western.”
Marie Chandler, James Chandler's wife, formerly a high school English teacher and more recently a full-time mother. Her self-control and especially her practical-mindedness contrast with her husband's character, yet she too is an idealist, albeit “mute.”
Karen, Susan, and Annie, Marie and James Chandler's daughters, ages eight, six, and two.
Rose Chandler, James's mother, a widow for thirty years. She has a goiter, walks with a cane, and is nearly blind, but she nevertheless seems as indomitable and unthinking as nature itself. In a way, she resembles her meditative, scholarly son, using lists to order her life in much the same way that he uses his lectures and writing.
George Chandler, James's father, now dead. Owner of a novelty shop, he spent much of his time dabbling in magic and pseudoscience and tinkering with, among other gadgets, a perpetual motion machine that he believed he eventually would get right with just a little more work. It was a beautiful machine, not unlike his wife's lists and more especially his son's philosophical writings.
Emma Staley, one of three aged sisters whom Chandler remembers from his youth and visits upon his return. She formerly was a painter in the Romantic style and is now virtually a cliché from gothic fiction, a “madwoman locked in the attic” who spends her days waiting.
Maud Staley, another of the sisters, a singing teacher.
Elizabeth Staley, the third sister, a piano teacher who, it turns out, is deaf.
Viola Staley, the Staley sisters' nineteen-year-old relative and ward. She may not be evil, as Rose Chandler claims, or “impure” and “unfit for nature,” as she herself thinks, but Viola certainly is strange, in part because she was orphaned at an early age; in part because she has lived thirteen years with her aunts, who are as odd as they are old; and in part because she has directed all her anger inward. When James has a seizure, she comes to his aid, and during the time he is hospitalized, she stays with his family. She believes herself to be profoundly changed by her four days with the Chandlers, by their interest in books and, more important, by their existence as a family. Wanting to come to life, for a time at least, she leaves Emma alone and goes to visit Chandler, the father figure to whom she feels herself romantically drawn. It is an act that will have dire if not quite tragic consequences for all concerned.
John Horne, an attorney specializing in more or less pointless legal research and, like Chandler, a patient in the local hospital. Badly scarred, foul smelling, and enormously fat, he is a caricature of the human condition, not a participant in life but merely a spectator, less a human being than a “sad clown.” He is grotesque, childishly demanding, frantic, and violent, and he is well aware of his condition. His endless prattling parallels James Chandler's philosophical musings.