Father and Son

For some reason, as I was reading last night, I actually began thinking about the possibility of the son paralleling as a "Christ-figure." There are many things along the man and boy's journey that point to the idea of Christ figure idea.

First off, there is the parallel of the finding the food to Jesus feeding the 5000. While I'll admit it's a stretch, it's still plausible. Just like Jesus seemed to make food appear out of nowhere, the boy was good at finding food out of nowhere, i.e. the house that the father didn't even see.

Also, there was the obvious parallel of the the boy's sacrificial attitudes. Throughout the novel, the boy wants to give what he has to the less fortunate. He wanted to help the man who was burned, the boy he thought he saw, and even the man who stole their cart and clothes. This is reminiscent of the "turn the other cheek" teachings of Jesus, where instead of taking everything the man had, the boy wanted to help the man out.

One parallel we didn't discuss in class was the "fish" part. The fish has long been a symbol of Christian faith, so the book ending with the trout shouldn't surprise us. On pages 30, 41 and for the last time in the closing paragraph, the narrator mentions having once watching the trout swim. In the final paragraph this could be the man talking about how he once watched the boy walk around the earth. In other the words, the trout could symbolize the boy and how the man watched them both and now that the man is dead, he is remembering how he used to watch the boy. While the boy looked rough on the outside, he still fought against the flow of the evil in the world just as the trough were "standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow."