Grief and racial understanding in Cry, the Beloved Country

Jarvis reacts to his son\'s death by trying to understand it. He wishes to give his son\'s death some meaning, and in doing so he undertakes a journey of understanding. He reads his son\'s writings and this causes him to learn more about racial inequality. So his way of reacting to his son\'s death is to try to learn from it, and grow from it, knowing that his son cannot be brought back. The wife, Margaret, takes the death as more of an emotional blow. One of the possible reasons for James\' reaction in particular is that he did not know his son very well. Margaret had raised her son, and takes the death poorly. She ends up playing more of a supporting role for her husband, than actively searching for meaning. Instead, she grieves more strongly and is more emotionally affected in a direct way.

The phrase Cry, The Beloved Country is important to the novel because the novel reflects in sorrow. The heart of the story is the two fathers, one black and one white, grieving for their sons. That is a metaphor for South Africa, a country that ultimately is bound by this sort of tradition -- custom is referenced a lot -- and these traditions have led to a broken country full of sorrow. The characters love their country, but they all realize that something is deeply broken and that there will be much more sorrow -- both the whites and the blacks will feel sorrow as the result of social inequities that exist.

3. Kumalo\'s physical weakness is shown in the way that it is revealed that he is quite old. There is a juxtaposition where he is trying to help his son, but this is at a point in his life when his son should be trying to help him. His physical body begins to break down a lot as the novel goes on -- he did not start especially weak but the arduous journey is breaking him down, and the emotional grief that he feels is only contributing to that breakdown.

4. Absalom is generally a weak and immature character. It is known that Absalom confesses his crime, for example, and that he basically lacked the ability to take care of himself in the city, and that is why he found himself in a life of crime. Ultimately, if he had the opportunity to meet Nelson Mandela or one of the other educated, strong leaders in the ANC, Absalom might have experienced his maturation in a different way. He found his maturity only in the face of his death, the realization of how his life\'s path had been, and he grew up because of it. Life in prison might not have sobered him up unless he was exposed to a stronger, leadership figure. It would be difficult to speculate how he would ultimately have turned out, but many people who were close to leading ANC figures ended up being strong supporters of reform. Absalom would have remained in prison for all of the apartheid period but had he survived his could have been a stronger voice, and certainly a leader in his community. Part of way he ended up as he did was that he came to the city with no education and met no good leaders or mentors when he arrived. He would have been better off meeting one of these leaders before killing Arthur Jarvis, as that would have given him much more potential, a cause behind which to rally.