A Walk to Remember

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Faith, Sickness, and Miracles

Jamie’s secret for the greatest part of the novel is that she is dying of leukemia. While she confesses the truth to Landon at the end of Chapter 11, there are many textual clues prior to this reveal, such as when Jamie confesses that she desperately wants the play to be the best ever this year, and when she gives Landon her Bible, which is her most prized possession. Jamie’s wish to get married before a packed congregation reflects her desire to come of age before her premature death. In Jamie’s case, her foray into sexuality and womanhood seems especially brief given that Landon is the first boy she has kissed. She’s also retained the same asexual, childlike appearance, where she goes “without a stitch of makeup” and wears “her usual brown cardigan and plaid skirt” (16) all the way through high school. Her entrance into the realm of sexual interest is rendered through Landon’s male gaze on the “two new bumps on her chest” (19) at the beginning of senior year, and the way she “smiled right at” him. With “a mischievous gleam in her eye” (155), a dying Jamie confesses to Landon that she knew that he would fall in love with her, although she is vague about the reasons for her certainty.

A likely answer for Jamie’s conviction is that, she trusts that “the Lord seems to have a plan that I just don’t know about yet” (74). Jamie’s faith is what carries her through her ambitious plans during her final months, and it presides over her relationship with Landon as she seeks to influence his religious outlook, including continually referring to God in their conversations. While Landon initially has more secular concerns on his mind, such as kissing Jamie, faced with the inexplicable fact of her imminent loss, he abandons the tools of logic and social convention and instead learns to rely on the Bible.

He prays for a miracle, to reverse Jamie’s fortune, and to help him to know how he should spend his last weeks with an ever-weakening Jamie. When Landon opens the Biblical passage: “I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it to the earnestness of others” (161), he hears the voice of God and knows that the answer lies in granting Jamie her wish of marriage. Whereas Jamie and Landon’s parents worry that the decision to marry is Landon’s favor to Jamie, he emphasizes that, as God commanded him, he “needed to do it” (165) for himself. That the story of Landon’s life-changing year ends not as one would predict—with Jamie’s death and the couple’s inevitable goodbye and not with their union at a wedding—strikes a hopeful, but also a haunting note. Jamie, who will soon die, has been granted her final wish, but Landon, who has many more decades to live, experiences this turn of events as “the most wonderful moment of my life” (169). There is the sense that Landon, who has never taken off his wedding ring, will live in the shadow of this singular moment for the rest of his life. On a more universal scale, it is not only Landon who remains touched by Jamie’s influence but Beaumont residents, who remember Jamie and feel that the couple’s “story in some ways is their story because it was something that all of us lived through” (1). However, Landon does not regret having the highlight of his life so early on, because he perceives the transformation that a once unpopular Jamie effected on him and the community as a miraculous instrument of faith.

Overturning Stereotypes

The rejection of stereotypes is an integral part of the novel’s plot, as Landon and his peers go from seeing Jamie as a predictably cheerful, Bible-touting ideologue to a “beautiful, […] kind, […] gentle” (133) role model. While the reader registers that Jamie, who flashes Landon a mysterious smile, is more than she seems from the outset, Landon is stuck on the idea that he, a rebel, could have nothing in common with “the kind of girl who made the rest of us look bad” (18) and even makes him feel “guilty” due to her religious beliefs. . As Landon becomes more aware of Jamie’s good looks behind the frumpy styling, her sense of humor, and the fact that she “had lots of different emotions” (74) and was not just permanently cheerful, his stereotyped image of her gives way to an honest, genuine assessment. . Despite there being plenty of evidence that Landon is a superficial rich kid overly concerned with popularity, Jamie does not stereotype him, seeing instead that he would make a good minister because he is “good with people” (71). While we do not learn whether the progeny of a corrupt bootlegger becomes a minister, Landon, and other popular kids such as Eric, take their faith more seriously and outgrow their shallow former selves after they outgrow their stereotypes of Jamie.

Whereas the stereotypes that Jamie and Landon fall into are overturned, other kids who are not conventionally good-looking are judged harshly and rejected for it. For example, Sally, a girl who has had a crush on Landon for a long time, has a glass eye, and were it not for this defect, which reminds him of “a mounted owl in a tacky antique shop” and gives him “the willies,” “the feeling might have been mutual” (60). Whereas Landon’s reasons for rejecting Sally are reported in a breezy, comic style, his ableist opinion that a disability makes someone undesirable is disturbing, and can imply that only conventionally attractive outcasts like Jamie are worthy of estimation. Similarly, the text treats the prospect of skinny, pimply stutterer Eddie Jones in the lead role of Tom Thornton—Miss Garber says “Eddie could have the role if no one else tried out for it” (53)—as a personal disaster for Jamie and her father, rather than reflecting on Eddie’s feelings at being treated as what amounts to a second-class citizen. Stereotyped as an awkward klutz, Eddie is grateful to be demoted to the “completely mute” role of bum, yet he still mishandles props and injures Landon on the day before the play even in this role. Here, Eddie functions as a comic device that adds to Landon’s frustrations on the day before the play, when Landon has his outburst. Portrayed as pathetic to the end, the text mocks Eddie for being excited about the play because “he probably thought that this would be the only time in his life when someone was interested in him. The sad thing was, he was probably right” (79). While Sparks presents Eddie as an obstacle that Landon needs to rescue Jamie from, Eddie’s humanity is ironically isprroutinely—diminished. The pigeonholing of Beaufort’s homelier youngsters in stock stereotypes sits oddly with the novel’s overall message that appearances are deceptive, thus reflecting a small-mindedness in its scope that plays negatively against the greater good (and virtues) of its main characters.

New Generation Romance and Old Family Feuds

Sparks’s novel plays to the classic tropes of the romance genre, whereby the offspring of feuding families fall in love. Landon’s family, the Carters, and Jamie’s family, the Sullivans, represent opposing pillars of Beaufort life. The Carter family, who well into the 1950s are defined by Landon’s paternal grandfather’s bootlegging and exploitative tactics, are aligned with wealth and social prestige, whereas the two-person Sullivan family are defined by religious morality and a life of service. Hegbert, who worked for Landon’s grandfather before turning to the ministry, continues to be suspicious of the Carter family, and his most damning sermons had their “name written all over them” (68). For his part, Landon, who is aware of the family feud, as well as of Hegbert’s eccentricity, commits childhood pranks in which he shouts that “Hegbert is a fornicator” (5).

Initially, Landon and Jamie fall into the same divisions as their families, as Landon is popular and amoral, whereas Jamie is isolated from her peers and devotes her free time to helping orphans and abandoned animals. However, they come to inhabit the same orbit when Landon is faced with a lack of eligible girls and is forced to ask Jamie to the homecoming dance in exchange for playing opposite her in the play. Although Landon wishes for a return to his normal life, he cannot resist Jamie’s requests because he is moved by her goodness and the sense that she is encouraging him to outgrow his old self and become a better person. As Jamie and Landon grow closer, Hegbert also goes from disliking Landon to respecting him. He allows his prejudices to melt, as he sees that Landon makes Jamie happy and that he is genuinely devoted to her. Similarly, the Carters make compromises by parting with their corruptly acquired money to further social causes, such as when Landon contributes his own allowance to embellish the orphans’ fund and when Worth pays for Jamie’s medical care so that she can spend her last days at home. Jamie and Landon’s marriage symbolizes not only the couple’s love but an end to the feud between their families. As their marriage will be cut short by Jamie’s impending death, the legacy of their love will be less tied in with their progeny than with righting past wrongs.