Two Wills and Two Worlds - Grisham's Will

Unlike Gleason's previous novels, The Testament devotes almost half of the book to the adventures and observations of the protagonist Nate in The Remote Pristine Ofe, Brazil, in Pantenaar, a remote ecological reserve in Brazil, expressing the author's yearning for a return to the simple way of life that the author exudes in "Partners".

Breaking through his past model of legal fiction, to which readers are accustomed, Grisham continues to expose the darkness of the American legal profession and the social professions associated with it, while at the same time showing the power and beauty of primitive nature and the goodness and humanity it awakens, and the arduous search for holiness that it inspires.

It can be seen that the author hopes and strives to make his best-selling novels contain more and deeper ideas, and he is not satisfied with the great successes he has achieved, and he tries to make his readers ponder some more enduring questions after a thrilling reading experience.

The novel begins and ends with a will—the will of the billionaire Feren and the will of rachel, a missionary. These two wills represent two very different ways of life, survival ideals and life pursuits, reflecting two very different worlds:

The world of hate and the world of love, the world of materialism and purification of the heart, the world of retribution and tolerance, the world of conspiracy and fraud and the world of honesty and openness, the world of depravity and despair and the world of self-salvation.

These two testaments are the outline of the novel as a whole, the most valuable symbol of meaning in the whole book, like Balzac's "Fugay Apartment" and "Madame Baucéon's Mansion", they symbolize the contrast, collision and the resulting release of meaning between two fundamentally different lives in the novel.

Phelan, the tenth-richest man in the United States for his private property, finally tired of all material pleasures and realized that money was the "root of pain" when he was "too old to play" at the time of the candle.

However, the hearts of others are not good, and their hearts are filled with extreme hatred for their three ex-wives and six children. He hated their infidelity, depravity, greed, viciousness — they gathered around him like a pack of vultures waiting to hunt his hefty $11 billion inheritance. Reminiscent of the 19th-century masterpiece Uncle Bunce and the 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning Eye of the Storm.

He did not realize that the depravity of his ex-wives and children was closely related to him. In this life, he only pursued his own wealth and enjoyment, and did not give his wife and children any human love. Like Balzac's tall old man, he thought that if he gave money, he would fulfill his duty as a husband and father, but he did not expect that it was the disastrous gifts of money that harmed them and turned them into profligate and ruthless demons.

He orchestrated a suicide-cost, brilliant and vicious will scam, stripping them of their inheritance in one fell swoop and giving him all his possessions to rachel, an illegitimate daughter who was unknown to him and far away. But he didn't have a preference for Rachel, and he didn't think about the charitable role of the inheritance being inherited by her alone, he "didn't care who got the money", he only cared about "who didn't get the money".

He had only one purpose: to punish his three wives and six sons most thoroughly. His spontaneous, decisive, courageous jump of suicide has no beauty, because that action exudes insidiousness, cunning, hatred, and evil. Although his wife and children were hateful and unworthy of a huge inheritance, this in no way meant that There was any justice for Feren and his will.

Phelan's will reflects not only the darkness of his own heart, but also the darkness of the entire world of money. The old Phelan's gifts and deprivations of money are essentially the same as his children and the unscrupulous lawyers and witnesses who hunt for money, all in essence, to use money to satisfy selfish desires, to control and destroy others.

That will, like the elder Feren himself, was the embodiment of the sin of money, the embodiment of the tyranny of money, and the distortion, alienation, and destruction of people by the desire for money. The will continues the harm that old Phelan inflicted on many people with money. As the work says: "No, he is not dead." Troy is still manipulating everything. ”

Money manipulates everything! What a shocking bluntness! From the desperate cries of the ancient Greek Aristophanes that "the world is subordinate to wealth" to Grisham's money "manipulating everything" in 1999 AD, we feel the terrible power of the money demon strongly and sadly through literature for thousands of years!

Human society has "evolved" for thousands of years, only to have produced a culture in which "everything is measured by money"! Rachel pointedly pointed out: This is a sad culture. Everyone lives in a frenzy. They work non-stop to be able to buy one kind or another in order to get people's attention. Their own value is measured by how much they have.

Rachel categorically rejected such a culture, preferring to live in a primitive civilization and spend her life with primitive Indian tribes. After graduating from medical school, she joined the "World Tribal Mission" and came to the primitive tribes of South America that were still in the Stone Age to treat diseases and spread teachings.

She lived with the natives of the Peruvian mountains for six years and spent another 11 years with the Indian tribes in Pantenaar, Brazil. She ate cassava, lived in a hut, slept in a hammock, and used furniture that was "unbelievably primitive"—"a chair made of rattan bundles, a chair with a stump as a leg and hay as a cushion."

However, "she didn't care about all this", and she found the greatest happiness in the most primitive and natural environment, the simplest life, and the most selfless dedication. "She's the happiest person I've ever met, willing to work for the people there for the rest of her life. That's God's oracle. ”

Rachel flatly rejected a huge inheritance of $11 billion that fell from the sky in his will, donating it all to charity. Rachel's will introduced us to another world. It is a wonderful world, and its core characteristics are love and devotion, return to authenticity and spiritual purification.

Nate's Pantenaer's journey to find Rachel is also his journey from the world of Phelan to the world of Rachel, the journey of his self-recovery, his journey to his authenticity, his journey of repentance, atonement, overcoming vices, and purifying his soul. The journey was so thrilling, with plane crashes, storms, boats, and serious illnesses, symbolizing the hardships, twists and turns of the road to the new world.

The temptations of the world of money have brought Nate, a brilliant lawyer, down. He was an alcoholic, drug addict, indulged in sex, abandoned his wife and children, illegally evaded taxes, was in debt, and attempted suicide several times. Expensive rehabilitation treatment that costs $1,000 a day not only doesn't get him out of his habits completely, but it also makes him "almost a robot."

He was admitted to a rehabilitation center several times, and vowed countless times to stay away from alcohol and drugs, but once he faced the temptations of reality again, he would lose, and he would faint at the sight of liquor, beer, and even beer advertisements, and he would be impulsive when he saw drug dealers and prostitutes. He finally realized that in this world his illness is incurable.

There will be no miracles there. He had already proved that he could not clean himself up there. Seeing the same people, doing the same things, committing the same vices until they completely collapse. He will always end up collapsing.

In search of rachel, the heir to the estate, Nate endures hardships and obstacles - both from the outside and fights against his bad habits, and finally enters a new world, meeting and falling in love with a new person he would never understand in the past - Rachel.

In Pantenaar, the world's largest swamp, Nate felt more freedom and comfort than ever, barefoot and topless, feeling that such a life was "much better" than the life of "going through the courtroom with a mobile phone in his pocket." He really wanted to "keep going like this,...... Even the coolest and tastiest beer in the world won't want to pull him away."

He not only quit bad habits such as alcoholism, but also learned to repent and pray under Rachel's infection, inspiration and encouragement, and finally found love and goodwill, and went to a new realm of self-salvation and self-improvement.

Nate's escape from The Pintenal symbolizes his resurrection and rebirth, symbolizing his transformation. Indeed, he became helpful, often helping Father Phil decorate the basement of the church. He is often filled with love, understanding and compassion in his dealings with others.

He even sympathized with his shameless opponents, "sympathizing with their poor growing conditions, sympathizing with their lack of due values, sympathizing with their empty lives of money worship." He often repented of his sins. He loaths all his weaknesses, but he does not cover them up, does not make excuses for them, does not deceive himself. He enumerated his weaknesses, determined to eliminate them.

Realizing what a failure he had been as a father, he drove long distances from the East Coast to the West Coast, finding his ex-wife and children and apologizing to them for his incompetence. Not only did he tolerate the indifference and ridicule of his relatives, but he also deeply blamed himself for this, realizing that the attitude of his wives and children towards him just showed the depth of the harm he had done to them in the past.

Pantenaar's trip prompted Nate to embark on the path of the Divine. Rachel helped him "stay away from the demons that shaped his life," "saw the good in him," and "discovered his inner call to God." Since then, Nate has been going to church a lot, reading the Bible a lot, and needing it from the bottom of his heart.

In the past, like many, he denied the sacred, doubted the sublime, ridiculed eternal meaning or value, had only money, sex, and fame in mind, and never believed that anyone "would be indifferent to money." Today, the path of "de-sanctification" has ended, and the path of "re-sanctification" is continuing to extend in front of Nate.

Nate's quest for the divine meaning lies not primarily in converting to religion, but in "re-sanctification" more broadly: seeking the "divine meaning" of the human world, especially man himself (psychologist Maslow), establishing and strengthening "consciousness of the eternal value of human nature" (philosopher Kierkegaard).

Although human beings need to smash the false sublime and deconstruct the false sacred, this in no way means denying all sacredness and belief, otherwise, human beings will not be able to develop truly and healthily, but can only become more and more vulgar, corrupt, and degenerate.

The two wills reflect two worlds: one is Phelan Sr., his wife and his children, lawyers and witnesses who sell their conscience and justice for money, and nathan's world before the transformation, and rachel, Father Phil, the kind and simple Indian, and the transformed world of Nate.

Through the comparative analysis of these two worlds, it is not difficult to see that the philosophical rationality and symbolism of Grisham's novels have been strengthened, his thinking on the plight and development of human beings has deepened, he is no longer satisfied with the criticism of ugly reality, but also devotes himself to the exploration of the way out of human predicament and the direction of healthy development, and his creation has clearly shown a trend from ordinary best-selling novels to serious pure literature.

However, inspiring readers to think about serious questions often hinders the reader's thoughtless reading pastimes. Because of this, it is often difficult for authors to balance the profound ideological implications of pure literature with the readership of best-selling books.

Grisham's use of such a large space to describe the protagonist's activities in the natural environment, his ideological transformation and the sublimation of personality, although necessary to deepen the ideas of the work, undoubtedly creates a problem for the author to grasp the attention of ordinary readers.

Because, compared to the ups and downs of the progress of the inheritance case, these depictions of the other world are less likely to arouse the reader's interest.

To solve this conundrum, Grisham sets the novel's two main suspense in a description of another world:

a) Does Rachel exist and can she be found?

ii) Did Rachel ultimately accept the estate? At the same time, it is very unusual for the two camps represented by Josh and Harker to adopt a direct narrative without suspense and without suspense, which Grisham did not do in the past.

In this way, the reader's curiosity, speculation, and expectation are directed to the progress of things that happen in another world, so that the center of the reader's interest falls on Rachel and Nate, so that the other world represented by them has more ideological connotations and more symbolic meanings has a strong artistic appeal.

In addition, Grisham, who has an accurate grasp of the reading interest and reading mentality of the general reader, has also adopted other artistic means: increasing the thrill of the protagonist's journey to Pontenaar; vividly depicting the original scenery of the Pantenaar Ecological Reserve; and selecting the $11 billion inheritance case, which is a very attractive event for the public.

With his masterful skill, he weaves the story ups and downs and gripping, exaggerates the wisdom and cunning, dexterity, and argumentativeness of the lawyers; and creates a dramatic, unexpected opening that "catches and engages the reader to read" (Grisham).

From time to time, some humorous dialogue is interspersed. While pursuing ideas and positive guidance is often less attractive than negative criticism, Grisham has taken pains to maintain the appeal of his work to the general public.

The organic combination of pure literature-like profound ideology and best-selling book-like readability is an important way for literature to expand its social influence, and it is also an effective choice for literature to maintain and expand its living and development space in the era of highly developed electronic media and film and television art. In this regard, Grisham's attempt has a valuable reference value.

Through two wills, we see and think about two worlds. The character who communicates these two worlds is the protagonist Nate, just as Rastigné communicates the two worlds in "The Tall Old Man".

Balzac's Rastigné finally bid farewell to the world of goodness and love represented by the tall old man, and plunged headlong into the world of deceitful money, mixed with infinite scenery, but lost his conscience, becoming a villain who was untrue, shameless, unjust, and immoral. Nate, on the contrary, decided to leave the legal profession and live in a world of love, kindness, sincerity, simplicity, and dedication to that wonderful world.

As he travels to the beautiful world, Nate looks back at the world he is about to abandon: his past is in another world, far away from him, in the cold and damp streets of Washington...