Everyman Character In A Lesson Before Dying

Words: 876
Pages: 4

Literature often enables characters to reflect upon themselves, and be met at a period of reckoning or an ending met by fate. Similarly from a modern day perspective, society’s approaches towards the days of judgment are consoled into a significant date at which an individual changes. In three different pieces of literature, varying in time periods, demonstrate the actions of characters upon their final days of reckoning and emotional reconciliation. The Everyman morality play, A Lesson Before Dying, and The Five People You Meet In Heaven, allow the main characters to dynamically change prior to heading on their journeys.
In the play, Everyman is a personified character of humankind recognized for his conflicting situation in interpreting his own judgment for the greater good
…show more content…
Despite Grant’s modernized era, the responsibility imposed on Grant to do something for the greater good of others and convict Jefferson, requires his moral judgment. The method in which Grant took in Jefferson’s situation is directly linked to the final reckoning moments of Jefferson. Fate had brought Jefferson into a situation where he was caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, which lead to his sentence of death by electrocution. The way in which Grant handles Jefferson’s execution and emotionally prepares him, demonstrates his significant role when fate called Jefferson and Grant to reckon. “How do people come up with a date and time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”, Grant states. With a perspective from both sides of the plot, spirituality influenced this call to reckoning where despite not believing in a God or higher power, both characters accepted fate’s role. Instead of God calling Jefferson on his lethal journey, Grant is conflicted with how society has cruelly misused the idea where they now possess the power