Graceful communities, eventually: An exploration of the relationship between community and grace in "The Double Hook", "Fugitive Pieces", "The Shipping News", and "Crackpot"

Abstract

Within the communities of The Double Hook, Fugitive Pieces, The Shipping News, and Crackpot, unexplainable and incomprehensible phenomena identify and define grace. Chapter one examines The Double Hook; analyzing the community's decimated state at the opening of the novel, it proceeds to an understanding of the role of grace within the community's recuperation of wholeness. Chapter two, focusing on Fugitive Pieces, examines an individual's responsibility in receiving grace and the manner in which grace expands when it is actively present in a community. Chapter three explores issues of incest, adultery, and death, which confront the community in The Shipping News. Rather than being destroyed by disaster, the community, consistently through the grace it receives, extends grace to those who most need it. Finally, chapter four reveals a community reconfigured by grace from a place of exclusion into a place of inclusion and restoration in Crackpot. The different perspective that each novel presents on the relationship between community and grace offers further insight into the incomprehensibility of grace and its consistent presence in Canadian literature.