River - By Shusaku Endo Term Paper

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For example, readers know Isobe's wife believed in reincarnation and that Isobe is looking for her reincarnated soul; and there he is in a gift shop, believing that he was pushed there by some "invisible power" (his dead wife?) and he sees Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine, and Children Who Remember Previous Lives by Professor Stevenson, both reincarnation books of course, and he buys them without thinking twice.

In this novel, the strivers are confronted not only with their own weaknesses and their own burdensome flaws and foibles, they are confronted with the Ganges River realities - loveliness and ugliness; hope and despair; death and life; bloated bodies floating along in darkness and living persons bobbing along happily. The contrasts are metaphors, it would seem, for the price one has to pay to gain that coveted redemption and reconciliation with the past.

For the Kiguchi character, his striving pays off. A much-needed reconciliation with his past is manifest when he reaches the Ganges; he has been plagued with his remembrances of that terrible walk through Burma, when "...they dragged their legs along in utter exhaustion." An "exact replica" of himself walking alongside himself kept saying, "Walk! You must keep walking!" The double of himself yelled, "Walk! Keep walking!" And now, at the great river in this nation of India with its mysticism and Buddhism, he is released from the grip of those horrific images of the Burma walk; like good and evil, like life and death, the two aspects of his conscious being are bonded, and they stand "back to back with each other, and they can't be separated the way you can cut things apart with a knife" (200).

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For Mitsuko, something similar has happened in her life that has happened to Kiguchi, in that she has a dueling power - an alter ego of sorts - alongside her too. One impulse urges her to give her time and talent to help heal the elderly and the sick in a healthcare environment; the other urge pulls her toward "the freshly severed head and blood-flecked lips" of the Hindu goddess, Kali. As she "flicked back and forth between...photos and paintings" [of the Hindu goddess], Mitsuko felt that both images were herself" (115). This is bizarre, but it results from her striving to find answers, searching for meaning and truth.

So, given these urges and bi-polar tugging in her consciousness, she had good reason to come to India to "search out the darkness in her own heart" (58). And there, at the river Ganges, she comes to terms, she reconciles, these polarized voices and urges within her.

In conclusion, each of these travelers confronts their own "demons" or "angels," if you will, on this trek to India. And that is the message the author apparently sends to readers, is strive, try, devote serious energy to finding solutions, for maybe there can be peace and redemption. Those thoughts are not hidden at all in the Negro Spiritual, from whence the novel's title was taken - "Deep River":

Deep River, my home is over Jordan,

Deep River, Lord, want to cross over into campground.

Oh don't you want to go

To that gospel feast,

That promised land….....

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