Author’s Note: This is the fourth article in my series on Finding Faith in Fandoms. This article contains spoilers for Tuck Everlasting.
Though I only discovered it a couple years ago, the 1975 novel Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt has become one of my favorite books. It is a children’s adventure and coming-of-age story, but also holds much for adults to ponder. Taking place in the first week of August, it is a perfect summer read, with beautifully written descriptions of nature and pensive reflections on life and death.
The plot of Tuck Everlasting revolves around 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 rendered them immortal. They do not age, and they cannot die. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster meets them and discovers their secret, she must choose whether 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 reckon with the inevitability of death. It is secular in its approach to this heavy topic, and no consolation is offered by way of belief in an afterlife or resurrection. Yet, paradoxically, this story about accepting the reality of death turns out to be a powerful affirmation of life.
The Original Plan
The novel contains one possible allusion to the Bible, pointing 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 mankind would not take its fruit and live forever (Genesis 3:22).
Why would God do that, if He intended—and intends—to give us eternal life? I am not a theologian, but I think the lessons drawn from Tuck Everlasting may point to an answer.
The spring is located at the base of an unchanging tree, reminiscent of the Tree of Life. The Tucks theorize that the spring may be “something left over … from some other plan for the way the world should be. … Some plan that didn’t work out too good” (Babbitt 41). This seems like a clear nod to the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. Looking at it this way, Tuck Everlasting serves as a thought experiment for 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 came that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” The Tucks try to make the best of their lives, but their immortality is not the “abundant life” promised by Jesus.
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 apparent. Miles’ wife and children left him because they thought he had sold his soul to the devil. They cannot stay anywhere for too long without running the risk of people discovering their secret. They reunite only once every ten years before going separate ways again.
The Tucks cope with their unusual situation in different ways, and Winnie hears each of their perspectives over the course of her time with them. Naturally, Winnie does not want to die, and so the water of the spring greatly appeals to her. But Angus, comparing the cycle of life to a wheel, explains, “dying’s part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can’t pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing. … You can’t have living without dying” (Babbitt 63-64). This hits on some truth about the connection between life and death. Jesus says multiple times in the gospels that one who loves his life and wishes to save it will lose it, whereas one who hates and gives up his life will find it and preserve it for eternity (Matthew 10:39, Matthew 16:25, John 12:25). The Tucks cannot experience the change and growth that characterize life, and since they cannot die, they are barred from the blessings of Heaven. They long for death because they long for true life, both on Earth and in Heaven.
The Serpent and the Substitute
The antagonist of Tuck Everlasting is the unnamed man in the yellow suit. He wants to find the spring and sell its water, offering “eternal life” to those who “deserve” or can afford it. This is much like the serpent tempting Eve, or the devil tempting us, with half-truths and false promises. But the Tucks know that immortality given that way would be a curse rather than a blessing, and that revealing the spring’s location could cause chaos for all humanity.
Fittingly, it is Mae, the mother of the Tuck family, who acts to protect her family and defeat their enemy. She attacks him by striking his head, an action that echoes Jael killing Sisera, Judith killing Holophernes, 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 of this injury, Mae is sentenced to hang, which would reveal her immortality to the world.
Winnie plays a somewhat Christlike role in the final act of the narrative. She helps Mae escape the authorities by taking her place in jail. Afterwards, she can only justify her actions with the fact that she loves the Tucks. Her parents are ashamed of her, and her actions make their social life difficult. But the local children come to visit Winnie, “impressed by what she had done,” wanting to be her friend, whereas before she seemed “almost, somehow, too clean to be a real friend” (Babbitt 130). This reminds me of how Jesus’ family did not believe him, and of the way Jesus dwelt among mankind rather than staying distant and untouchable.
The Wheel
Tuck Everlasting may show 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 for Him to give, not for us to grasp for and steal. Attempting to do so will lead to death rather than life.
Though 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 that is real and, paradoxically, necessary for true life. The Good News is that for Christians, death is no longer to be feared because it has been defeated, and so it is not final. We have hope of going to heaven when we die and the resurrection of our bodies at the end of time. We can have the full experience of the wheel.
Photo by Florian Pinkert on Unsplash
