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Nicholas SparksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Jamie’s Bible is a prized possession that she carries with her everywhere, and is a key motif in the novel. To outsiders, it is a marker of both her religious devoutness and her eccentricity. When Landon is going to take her to the homecoming dance, he is relieved that “at least she wasn’t planning on bringing her Bible” (38), because it would have shown her as a freak in his eyes, and embarrassed him. Jamie’s Bible-carrying, coupled with her other good deeds, have the effect of making her peers feel that they are continually guilty.
However, the truth of Jamie’s Bible, which is “old and the cover was kind of ratty looking” (84), is that it belonged to her dead mother. The Bible was given to Jamie’s parents at their wedding, and her mother “‘read it all the time, especially whenever she was going through a hard time in her life” (85). The Bible was in the hospital when Jamie’s mother died in childbirth. Jamie, who knows that Hegbert carried both her and the Bible home with him, feels that “[i]t just gives me a way to … to be part of her” (85). When Jamie gifts Landon the Bible, she is arguably performing a similar gesture and hopes that the book’s words, in addition to her own, will be part of him after she dies.
The Bible figures again on Jamie’s deathbed, when Landon takes to reading it as a way of bonding with Jamie and a hope of receiving comfort and guidance. It is a passage in the Bible that eventually directs him to marry her, a decision that “I’ve never felt so good about anything” (169) in his life. The changing significance of Jamie’s Bible, which appears as one thing to outsiders but is in reality something more profound, is aligned with Landon’s changing perception of Jamie. As he takes on the Bible, first as Jamie’s gift and then as a guide of his own, the book becomes symbolic of his own changed nature.
Hegbert’s play The Christmas Angel, a corrective to the English, Victorian author Charles Dickens’s more famous A Christmas Carol, is a dominant motif in the novel. The play is the means of forcing Jamie and Landon to spend more time together. Hegbert initially wrote his play because he regarded A Christmas Carol as too heathen—because the phantoms Scrooge saw were too ambiguous and may not have been sent by God. In contrast, his autobiographical play, The Christmas Angel, whereby a widower endures religious doubt and has to raise a little girl alone until the guidance of an Angel restores him to his faith and helps him find the music box gift desired by his daughter, is unequivocally religious in its messaging.
The Beaufort Playhouse puts on the play annually. Christmas of 1958 is a unique and poignant year for the play, however, because Hegbert’s dying daughter Jamie will play the Angel, and Landon, who comes from the corrupt Carter family, will play Tom Thornton. Landon undergoes a similar journey to his character Tom because he too has turned his back on a religious and charitable way of life but learns to become more religious following his association with angelic Jamie. He initially struggles to say the line “You’re beautiful” with conviction to Jamie, because he knows that she is guiding him on a virtuous path and he can’t yet see that she and this path are beautiful too. When Landon is able to say the line with a sense of authenticity on the night of the performance, he finds true beauty in the way of life that Jamie represents, a lifestyle espoused explicitly in the play.
The play thus goes from being fiction to reality for Landon, and Jamie is “not only the angel who saved Tom Thornton” but the “angel who saved us all” (166). Angelic, both in the play and in real life, Jamie is a messenger who comes to deliver Landon and the public with her truth before she has to go. Like the angel in the play, Jamie’s impending death means that she cannot be permanently possessed, although she can and does leave an indelible mark.
Parochial and distinguished, the setting of Beaufort is a crucial motif in the novel and in Sparks’s brand as a whole, as beach towns on the Carolinian coast feature in numerous novels. Peppered with Southern historic locales as well as areas of wild natural beauty such as Bogue Banks—the island where Landon takes Jamie in her last weeks, and a place where “you can witness spectacular sunrises and sunsets […] taking place over the expanse of the mighty Atlantic Ocean” (153)—Sparks’s North Carolinian beach settings provide a suitably enticing and nostalgic atmosphere for romance.
Both “fairly typical as far as southern towns went” (8) and unique for its associations with Blackbeard the pirate, Beaufort is prosaic enough to be relatable and special enough to be interesting. Landon, “the richest kid in school” (21) who lives on the side of town by the waterfront “just a few doors down from where Blackbeard used to live” (51), is most familiar with the historic, picturesque part of town. However, as he begins to associate with Jamie, he discovers other distinguished parts of town “across the railroad tracks” (51). Crossing the railroad tracks to reach Jamie’s house is itself symbolic as it is a metaphor for Landon’s journey out of his comfort zone and into the unknown. He famously complains that he has to “trek a mile out of my way” (89) to make sure Jamie gets home after rehearsals, and makes visits with her to the orphanage, which is so far he has to drive to get there.
As Landon’s Beaufort expands beyond the familiar haunts he visits with his friends, so does his understanding of life. While Landon becomes familiar with different parts of Beaufort, unity blooms at the end of the novel when people from different sectors of society end up at the church where he marries Jamie. A sense of continuity is delivered when the older Landon declares that Beaufort has changed, but the air is still “the air of my childhood, the air of my seventeenth year” (117), a phrase that suggests the atmosphere of the time is still the same. Enhancing this picture of sameness is the fact that all the characters in Sparks’s novel are white. While 17-year-old Landon’s story would have taken place during the era of racial segregation and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, African Americans are conspicuously absent. Though Beaufort is indeed beautiful, this absence gives the impression of a homogeneously white society that stands apart from the political and social concerns of its age.
By Nicholas Sparks