Literature Annotations
 |
O'Nan, Stewart |
| Genre | Novel (195 pp.) |
| Keywords | Caregivers, Catastrophe, Death and Dying, Disease and Health, Epidemics, Grief, History of Medicine, Human Worth, Infectious Disease, Loneliness, Love, Medical Ethics, Mourning, Professionalism, Public Health, Survival, Trauma |
| Summary | Jacob Hansen is sheriff, undertaker, and pastor in the little Wisconsin town of friendship. A Civil War veteran like many of the men in his town, he has seen many faces of death and knows how to balance compassion, prayer, and practicality in the presence of grief. When he recognizes a diphtheria epidemic as one after another the people of Friendship fall ill and die, he has to shoulder responsibility for protecting public health. This means imposing and enforcing quarantine, extending even to the encampment of religious revivalists at the edge of town who mostly keep their distance and their own ways. Jacob's equanimity falters when his wife and baby daughter succumb; he keeps them alive in his mind and unburied for days, unable to acknowledge his own loss, though he helps others through theirs. Finally he forces a passing railroad engineer to transport the survivors across the quarantine border into a neighboring town for safety, but the train is sabotaged, wrecked, and the fugitives killed. Jacob survives almost alone to return to what is now a ghost town and cope with the grim fate of survival. |
| Commentary | This haunting novel, written in the second person, paints a disturbing picture both of the reality of an epidemic in an age before effective vaccines and antibiotics and of the psychology of one who witnesses mass death. This story might take a place beside Poe's The Masque of the Red Death in a course on the literature of epidemics, raising unsettling questions about the strategies that enable some to survive what drives others to madness or suicide. Because it is told in the second person (which some readers might find a bit distracting at first) we seem to be required to fathom Jacob's complex character from the inside looking out. |
| Publisher | Henry Holt |
| Edition | 1999 |
| Place Published | New York |
| Annotated by | McEntyre, Marilyn Chandler |
| Date of Entry | 11/05/99 |
| Last Revised | 12/21/99 |