Author’s Note: This is the fourth article in my series on finding trust in fandoms. This article contains spoilers for Tuck Everlasting.
Although I only discovered it a few years ago, the 1975 novel Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt has become one of my favorite books. It is an adventure and coming-of-age story for children, but also offers plenty of food for thought for adults. It is set in the first week of August and, with its beautifully written descriptions of nature and thoughtful reflections on life and death, is the perfect summer read.
The plot of Tuck Everlasting is about a spring whose water grants the drinker immortality. The Tuck family – Angus, his wife Mae and their sons Miles and Jesse – made the mistake of drinking water from the spring, which made them immortal. They do not age and cannot die. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster meets them and discovers their secret, she must decide whether she wants to drink the water and stay young forever or grow up and eventually die.
According to a 2015 interview, Babbitt wrote the book to help her own child come to terms with the inevitability of death. The book tackles this difficult subject in a secular way, offering no comfort through belief in an afterlife or resurrection. Yet paradoxically, this story of accepting the reality of death turns out to be a powerful affirmation of life.
The original plan
The novel contains a possible allusion to the Bible and refers back to the story of creation.
God placed two trees in the center of the Garden of Eden: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:9). When Adam and Eve took the fruit of knowledge, God sent angels to guard the tree of life so that mankind could not take its fruit and live forever (Genesis 3:22).
Why would God do that if he wanted to give us eternal life – and still wants to? I am not a theologian, but I think the lessons from Tuck Everlasting could indicate an answer.
The spring is located at the foot of an unchanging tree, reminiscent of the Tree of Life. The Tucks suggest that the spring may be “something left over…from another plan for how the world should be. …A plan that didn’t work out so well” (Babbitt 41). This seems to be a clear allusion to the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. Viewed this way: Tuck Everlasting serves as a thought experiment about what would happen if someone became immortal while still living in a fallen, aging, death-filled world.
The meaning of life
In John 10:10, Jesus says, “I have come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.” The Tucks try to make the most of their lives, but their immortality is not the “abundant life” that Jesus promised.
One of the worst consequences of the Tucks’ immortality is that they are cut off from the rest of the world. Their friends and neighbors turned away from them as their agelessness became more and more apparent. Miles’ wife and children left him because they thought he had sold his soul to the devil. They can’t stay anywhere for too long without risking people discovering their secret. They only meet again every ten years before going their separate ways again.
The Tucks cope with their unusual situation in different ways, and Winnie listens to each one’s perspective over the course of the time she spends with them. Of course, Winnie does not want to die, and so the waters of the spring have great appeal for her. But Angus compares the cycle of life to a wheel, explaining, “Dying is part of the wheel, just like birth. You can’t pick out the parts you like and leave the rest. To be part of the whole is the blessing. … You cannot live without dying” (Babbitt 63-64). This hits on a truth about the connection between life and death. Jesus says several times in the Gospels that the one who loves his life and wants to save it will lose it, while the one who hates his life and gives it up will find it and preserve it for eternity. (Matthew 10:39, Matthew 16:25, John 12:25) The Tucks cannot experience the changes and growth that characterize life, and since they cannot die, they are denied the blessings of heaven. They long for death because they long for true life, both on earth and in heaven.
The Snake and the Deputy
The antagonist of Tuck Everlasting is the nameless man in the yellow suit. He wants to find the spring and sell its water, offering “eternal life” to those who “deserve” it or can afford it. It’s like the serpent tempting Eve or the devil tempting us with half-truths and false promises. But the Tucks know that immortality in this way would be a curse rather than a blessing, and that revealing the location of the spring could mean chaos for all of humanity.
Fittingly, it is Mae, the mother of the Tuck family, who acts to protect her family and defeat her enemy. She attacks him by striking him on the head, an action reminiscent of Jael’s killing of Sisera, Judith’s killing of Holopherne, and the image of Mary crushing Satan’s head (a symbolic reference to the prophecy of Genesis 3:15)! But when the man in the yellow suit dies from this injury, Mae is sentenced to death by hanging, which would reveal her immortality to the world.
Winnie plays a somewhat Christ-like role in the last act of the story. She helps Mae escape the authorities by taking her place in prison. After that, she can only justify her actions by saying that she loves the Tucks. Her parents are ashamed of her and her actions make their social lives difficult. But the local children come to visit Winnie, “impressed by what she has done,” and want to be her friend, whereas before she was “almost, somehow too clean to be a true friend” (Babbitt 130). This reminds me that Jesus’ family did not believe him and that Jesus lived among the people instead of remaining distant and unapproachable.
The wheel
Tuck Everlasting perhaps shows that it was for the best that God prevented mankind from accessing the tree of life. Life is precious and God offers us eternal life, but it is His job to give it, not our job to reach out and steal it. Trying to do so leads to death rather than life.
Although we believe in Christ’s victory over death, we still live in a world tainted by original sin. While we are here, we must reckon with death as something real and, paradoxically, necessary for true life. The good news is that Christians no longer need to fear death because it has been defeated and is therefore not final. We have the hope of going to heaven after we die and of being resurrected from our bodies at the end of time. We can experience the wheel in all its fullness.
Photo by Florian Pinkert on Unsplash
