p34: “Meanwhile, at home in Stanford Hill, Esau and Sarah, locked in prayer through the 24 hours of the Sabbath, wondered what would happen to their boy who had fallen into the clutches of a flame-haired temptress.”
This passage struck me because it is so different than much of the rest of the story, and yet still maintains the running themes, just in a different flavor. The rest of the story focuses on the Narrator (shortened to N) and the people N knows and interacts with. Yet N is almost nothing like Esau and Sarah, and barely interacts with them, only knowing them as the parents of the husband of the woman N falls in love with. Yet here and now they are momentarily the most important people in the story, and I wanted to examine how they related to the running themes.
“Why is the measure of love loss?” This is a running theme throughout the story, and it was only after dissecting the passage that I realized we were seeing another flavor of that theme here. Esau and Sarah feel that they are losing their son and are powerless to stop it, which is reflected by the word choices: locked in prayer holds implications of being frozen and unwillingly immobile; their boy is a diminutive possessive term showing that they still care for him and are not angry at his choices, only afraid; clutches is used in reference to Louise possessing “their boy” and has negative connotations of jealousy or insidious plots; and fallen, especially so in the same sentence as Sabbath, has connotations of falling from grace, fallen angels, and falling for a plot.
In a way Esau and Sarah may be the (morally) best characters shown in the book, as while they are unwilling to compromise their own beliefs, they still unconditionally accept their sons choices and care only that he may be hurt, rather than showing the various levels of selfishness seen in other characters.