Good and Evil in The Gathering by Anne Enright

“At the beginning of the cycle, the darkness calls, drawing like to like until one comes who is empty: like a vessel who will gather the darkness into it, and enable infection to grow and extend like cancer. The vessel has come, the darkness now gathers” (page 84). Evil that gathers in Cheshunt comes in shades of colours: “fire-red” and “uniform-blue”. But each of these evils are defeated by “love-white”. The mental battle of evil and how evil can be abusive, aggressive and violent (fire-red) and the deceptiveness and dishonesty of authority (uniform – blue) can be hard to fight, but the good (love-white) overcomes all and wins against any colour of evil even though every colour makes white and every shade of evil makes up good.

In the novel, The Gathering, the theme good and evil and how it can be aggressive, abusive and violent is explored and developed. It is shown, that even though people are evil in this story, there are different colours and forms of evil. The way one person shows evil, could be completely different to another person and the extent of the evilness vary. For example, Buddha and his bullies are not as evil as Seth’s father and Mr. Karle. Seth’s father and Mr. Karle lead every other follower of evil and show them how to be evil. Buddha and his bully followers are only following the evil and treating people how they are being shown to treat them. Buddha intimidates Nathanial on his first day because he is weak and doesn’t fit in. Mr. Karle however calls Nathanial’s mother and “lies” to her telling that he believes that Nathanial is rude and disruptive in class and that he got a detention for this.

It is not only evil that is explored throughout the novel, but good as well. People say good comes in white and always rises above evil, but this is debatable. Although good always rises above evil eventually, just like the Chain, white is made up of every colour in the spectrum and therefore good can contain evil and people who are evil could originate from being good. A good example of this is shown by Danny in The Gathering. He treats younger people just like the police treated him and spreads his story so that all people younger than him will know what happened and what police are capable of.