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Themes In Cry, The Beloved Country By Alan Paton

Decent Essays

Abraham Lincoln once stated that, “If you look for the bad in people and expect to find it, you surely will.” Stephen struggles with detecting the faults in other people's lives throughout the book Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Anticipating people to embody a bad reputation could ruin his relationships with the people he meets. When Stephen, a father and Umfundisi looking for his family, visits his son’s girlfriend and his sister in the city of Johannesburg, the conditions they live in shock him and he immediately judges them because he expected to discover something bad and he did. Stephen evinces the redemption cycle through his interactions with Absalom's girlfriend and his sister Gertrude. Stephen sinned against Absalom’s girlfriend, a pregnant and soon-to-be widow, because he tested her to see if she will be loyal to his son and reconciled with her by taking her into his home and raising her as his daughter. When Stephen went to see the girl, he found out that she had three husbands before Absalom. He asked her if she would be willing to sleep with someone else, after she said no he asked, “not even...if I desired you?”(Paton 146). Immediately after Stephen said this and he realized that he should not have asked her this question because she never had a father figure in her life to teach her that this choice is wrong. Using the word “desired” shows how hard Stephen wanted to test her. He wanted to make it hard for her to make a decision to see if she would

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