Suffering in The Book of Ruth

It is inevitable that everyone suffers. No one has a perfect life, so at one point or another, every person in the world will have a bad day, week, or year. Everyone experiences their own losses, but the way we react to those losses determines what happens to the rest of our lives. In The Book of Ruth, all the characters deal with events that hurt and scare them. Most characters have little problems that scar them forever, or big problems that they sometimes don’t even detect. While some of these characters let these problems ruin their lives, others rose above their everyday struggles to find a better life. Ruth, Matt, Daisy and May all took very different approaches on their suffering. Some of the characters use their suffering to motivate them, while others let their suffering wear them down.

Throughout the book, Ruth is exposed to many forms of verbal and physical abuse. These abuses hurt her, but she is just as hurt by the little things as well. She is forced to deal with problems, like when her own mother doesn’t buy her a brassiere, or when all the kids at school look up her skirt and tell her they will be her “best friend”. She suffers many embarrassing moments throughout the book. That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t enjoy herself at times. During her childhood, she specifically remembers one good day, when she ate ice cream in July with her family.

“It took me several years to figure out that on that July night we were actually experiencing the gladness some people feel everyday, not just once a summer. I saw how it was with other people, because I watched the children in church, running to their mothers after Sunday school. I saw it every Sunday, week after week, year after year. The mothers swept the ...

... middle of paper ...

...hance for her; here was a baby coming to live and grow at her house. She was listening, already, to the stories Justy was going to tell about his grandmother, how she leaped up on the roof when the house was burning and pulled him from the fire.”

May’s last years were made happy by Justy, but because of her constant nagging of Ruby and every move that he made, she sent her son-in-law off the deep end. The events that shaped May also killed her. If she hadn’t been so negative to Ruby, he wouldn’t have lashed out at her and brutally murdered her.

The characters in The Book of Ruth all dealt with their suffering in different ways. Ruth, Daisy, and Matt chose to do something about it. May chose to let it ruin her. So it is only appropriate that the one character that let the suffering overtake her, is the one character that is dead at the conclusion of the novel.