The Third Bank of the River

I've loved this story since I first read it. Actually, loved is the wrong word. The story moves and hurts me. The feeling of being so well understood by a story--and of understanding the unspoken mood captured in it--is a sublime feeling. But it is not an easy story to read.

I looked up some analyses of it recently, and I didn't feel that they interpreted the story the way I understood it. They are probably more researched and correct interpretations, but I'm not sure.

Most articles that I read accept the idea that the father in the story is dead--that the small boat and the river symbolized his movement from life to death. In the imagery, I can certainly see familiar motifs of the journey between life and death.

But when I read it, it seemed more human and more mystical at the same time; it was the narrator's guilt and desire for his father to be relieved of his burden that spoke to me. In fact, the whole story, to me, is about the weight of burdens. What makes the father, silently and without question, leave his family and live alone in pain and hardship? What burden did he feel weighing on him so much that he could not be with his children, yet he could never travel far enough to be out of sight? To me, it read more like a story about a child trying to understand his parent's mental suffering.

I saw the story expressing two parallel possibilities: the attempt to understand depression, mental pain, and that slow withdrawal from the world; and on a higher plane, the idea of being called to some spiritual journey that requires the sacrifice of comfort and love. It even calls you to forsake those to whom you have responsibility.

The son feels it is his fault. Perhaps his father is dead. But what makes this story so much more poignant, to me, is the idea that the father is there still, in body, and the son cannot save him. This failure, the son's great impotence, causes his guilt.

Anyone whose parent has lived a painful life, an unrealized life, a life of depression, or of some other great loss, can probably relate to the guilt that shadows everything he does in life. He feels guilty for trying to live, for his own comfort and happiness, etc.

When the narrator attempts to take his father's place, I don't see it as following the father in suicide or death. I see it as trying one last time to take the father's burden off his shoulders. The terror, though, of being swallowed by such a fate overwhelms him, and he retreats. I can relate to this, too.

This story is one that you could probably read and interpret over and over in many ways; that's part of its beauty.

But when I read it, everytime I feel the weight of those unspeakable burdens that we all carry, that some of us grow more and more aware of until that awareness blots out all other purposes in life. Whether those burdens are divine or human doesn't really matter. None of us can save another person, but we can all feel the grief of trying, and failing.

Of all the stories I've read, this one has stayed with me longest and most sharply. I wish I could speak to the author and ask him a few questions. But maybe it's better this way. It articulates something I need articulated. It makes me feel heavier and lighter at the same time.