Personal Reflections on Reading A Lesson Before Dying

I wanted to have a cynical, emotional detachment. “I know how this ends”, “I’ve seen this before”, “It’s just a formula”. Once I grasped the premise of the novel, I was reminded of a Korean movie Miracle In Cell No. 7, about a mentally disabled father who is wrongly sentenced to death over the death of a child, on a journey to appeal his case with the help of his 10 year old daughter and good-willed inmates. There were some similar elements of the abusive power of the state and justice system, a coldhearted and uncaring manipulative system set to satisfy those only in power. But the movie mostly rode on the emotional attachment to the characters and limped to a weak and somewhat unsatisfying ending. There was too much fluff, too much that felt inauthentic, and so too much of the movie felt like it was trying to manipulate its audience, making for an emotional detachment in the finale. Because of this, I was somewhat cocky going into the novel, confident that I wouldn’t be swept away by the feels train only taking me to an ending leaving me feeling cheated.

Yeah, so the person on death row becomes the saint that everyone looks up to, and right when everyone realizes how much they love that person, they die and it’s really sad, but they are remembered in memory for how great they are. Big whoop. Already seen before. But what was initially overconfidence in the beginning, turned into a mild amusement at Grant’s sometimes immature character, turned into frustration at Jefferson but also confusion and pity, turned to anger at the whole situation, until I was all of a sudden so emotionally invested in the novel. I couldn’t help but to read ahead of the assigned pages. Knowing how the story would end was no longer relevant, I wanted to know how they got there, I wanted the journey there.

Looking back, my initial cockiness is laughable, but in other ways interesting. I think in some part inside of me, I knew that I would become emotionally invested, and that the ending would make me sad, and so I wanted to protect myself from that pain. It’s the classic ending of any story where the closest person to the protagonist dies, where they’ve been doomed from the beginning. In the same way, you as the audience are doomed from the beginning. As soon as you pick up that book, it isn’t long before you become invested and will have to suffer sadness in the death of the character that you’ve grown to love and care for just as most of the other characters in the book have. But why? Why subject ourselves to such pain and sadness? Why was The Fault In Our Stars such a smash hit of a novel? Because in the end, there is so much to be learned from the sadness. The doomed fate of a character amplifies the effect in the people surrounding them, and their good can extend beyond their mortality, touching us and moving us to act in a different way than we have done before.  

Reading this novel moved me deeply. I was helplessly thrown around emotionally, completely opposite of the emotionally composed self that I had fronted. I thought I could write out particular reasons as to why, but I’m failing to organize them into words. The ending of this novel left me in a mess, unable to do or think about anything until I finally just fell asleep. All I can say is that there were so many profound ideas gifted from this novel, a lot that resonated me at a personal level, but there was also a horrible sort of beauty to the ending of the novel, that left me in awe. After I had finished the last page, there wasn’t a tinge of regret, or hunger for more like when I finish other books. Instead all that I was left with was a deep sense of gratitude for the journey I had been taken on, and from the lessons that I had learned and taken to heart.