The Strength Of God by Sherwood Anderson, 1919
The magic trick:
Having the protagonist – instead of the reader – search the story’s events for religious meaning
It’s not uncommon to see a story employ religious imagery or metaphor to convey its theme. In today’s feature, Sherwood Anderson takes that a step further: he has his protagonist interpret the events of the story through a religious lens. It’s his struggle to square all of this that lends the story its conflict. And that’s quite a trick on Anderson’s part.
The selection:
Three times during the early fall and winter of that year Curtis Hartman crept out of his house to the room in the bell tower to sit in the darkness looking at the figure of Kate Swift lying in her bed and later went to walk and pray in the streets. He could not understand himself. For weeks he would go along scarcely thinking of the school teacher and telling himself that he had conquered the carnal desire to look at her body. And then something would happen. As he sat in the study of his own house, hard at work on a sermon, he would become nervous and begin to walk up and down the room. “I will go out into the streets,” he told himself and even as he let himself in at the church door he persistently denied to himself the cause of his being there. “I will not repair the hole in the window and I will train myself to come here at night and sit in the presence of this woman without raising my eyes. I will not be defeated in this thing. The Lord has devised this temptation as a test of my soul and I will grope my way out of darkness into the light of righteousness.”
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