Henry Walker and the Three of Hearts Essay

atomic number 1 Walker, the self-made Negro magician or rather the self-made freak can simply present his deportment through the analysis of his signature card trick the use of the Three of Hearts. Each of these hearts represents cardinal of the women who played significant roles in his smell. These women were his generate, his baby Hannah, and his fri wind up and lover, Marianne la Fleur. enthalpys arrive The convey of Henry Walker best represents the primary source of tragedy in the story.It can be famous that the setting of the story best emphasizes its tragic theme only when the plot reaches a recollection of Henrys youth, where the young boy loses his mother. In whizz way or other, Henrys mother symbolized familial care and love which should be nurturing, supportive, and developmental something which the magician was deprived of at a actually young age. Technically, the lack of a mother equated to the lack of family, the conflict which Henry tries so hard to resolve all throughout the story.To a certain sense, the mother or rather the lack of having a mother best depicts Henry Walker as a lost soul in perpetual wail over his departed family. She is the first of Henrys sleddinges and believably the most dreadful of all. However, unlike other losses, the loss of Henrys mother is probably the only reliable event in the story which is not masked by any illusion or schizophrenic dilemma. It was clear that his mother died from a disease before his ninth birthday and from there, his life has gone towards the worst as he is left in the arms of his lying father.To a certain sense, much of Henrys doomed destiny can be blamed on the fact that he had lost his mother. With a mother, mayhap Henry might have had a more real life and he might have not lived under pretentious and perplexing situations fostered by his imagination and his fathers false encouragements. The role of the mother was to create a real reality, upholding a family that is essential for the foundation and formation of emotionally, socially, and psychologically profound individuals. The lack of fulfillment for this motherly role in Henry Walkers life shows why almost everything went wrong.It can also be remark that whenever the lack of motherly care is tackled in the story, Henry is almost always merely seen as a little young boy helpless and innocent, not an egomaniac who is forging stories and lies for his own benefit. With his mother, Henry becomes a victim of lifes cruelty, a once pure soul who has been corrupted because of the lack of love. As such, aside from setting what was supposed to be real and right in the magicians life, the mother was supposed to maintain Henrys chasteness.Through his mother, Henry is blameless and naive You have to know whats true to lie and Henry didnt. He didnt know the difference. Whats more is that the early loss of a mother therefore established a series of losses for Henry. As noted in the book, for Henry, life is One lo sing battle after another Winning doesnt even exist, really, not as something you can hold on to its just something that happens between losses. Henrys sister, Hanna If Henrys mother or rather the lack of her was the ultimate source of tragedy in the magicians life, his sister Hannah was the reverse.Although the boy also lost her sister when he was nearing eleven, the loss of her sister gave his life meaning although an illusionary one. As shown in the story, because Henry Walker believed that his sister was stolen by the Devil Mr. Sebastian, he had commit his life into looking for her. That search gave her a source of life and a direction which he cannot simply find. In this sense, Hannah symbolized a crusade for both requital and righteousness for the magician. Hannahs loss shows the different side of the magician one who is no longer lured by innocence and youthfulness.Instead, through the vanishing of his sister, Henry becomes a miracle worker, individual that has power and will to defeat the devil. This determination and motivation originating from the loss of his loved one and from his guilt showed a singular Henry, a surprising persona that cannot be expected from a feeble man that the Negro magician posed himself to be. As claimed by Adam Sobsey, When late in the book he (Henry Walker) declares that hes spent his entire life looking for his lost sister and her kidnapper, its almost a surprise Hes scarcely shown that variant of will or anima.He is, in the words of one character, like a puddle in the sun every day he became little and smaller. Hannah symbolized the fight against evil for Henry. As noted by the Daniel Wallace, the author, in one of his interviews The stories that Henry has embraced, generated by his father, that only the Devil could have engineered the taking away of Henrys sister. So, Henry had to believe in that evil in order to set himself up as a force of good in the world. This was symbolically exclamatory in the story as Hannah was often referred to have angelic qualities.As such, the loss of Hannah which Henry though was his fault made Henrys life a struggle between good and evil and that somehow presented a sense of order into the complexities of the real scenarios that the magician was involved in. However, Hannah was also a source of Henrys tortuous frustrations for he never can really rescue her from the Devil and Henry will never win against evil. This was emphasized by Henry in the novel Evil always wins Eventually evil wins. We fight it because its the right thing to do, but in the end well always lose.Always. Because to be good- truly good- there are rules, we have rules inside of us, rules we have to follow to be that way, to stay good. And evil can do anything it wants to. Its not a fair fight. Wallace, the author, also notes that Henry will always fail at his goal to defeat the Devil because The fact is that evil doesnt exist. There isnt this Manichean struggle between the two. Ma rianne La Fleur, the unattainable Marianne La Fleur, the stage assistant, was the centerpiece in Henry Walker baffling life.In the novel, Henry brings her back to life in one of his shows. This stunt proves to be a success in Henrys career. This somehow symbolizes Henrys one good shot back at life however, the trick fails to receive much awe as its eeriness does not impress the hot audience. In his attempt to love and to be loved, Henry also fails to no avail. Yet, Marianne serves a very defining role in Henrys life. In a sense, she was the magicians hope to life and love which remains unattainable, despite their similarities in freakishness.If Henry was presented as a man who had a devastatingly depressing life, his assistant whom he loved mirrored the same degree of oddity that he posed Marianne La Fleur was not ugly, though she was something worse. She was scary. Or no haunted. She was a haunted woman about whom, when you looked at her, you would wonder, What happened to her? . . . She was odd, and everything she did was odd. . . . Ask her a question, and there was always an uncomfortable pause before she replied. Even the simplest question, How are you? One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three.Fine, she said. One, one thousand. How are you? As described in the novel, Marianne was someone whose characteristics dwell between the living and dead. She was as troubled as the magician and that was probably why he became attracted to her. Through Marianne, Henry defines his fondness of the odd and the haunted. By being attracted to his weird stage assistant who is described as a shaft ever fluttering on the border between Life and Death, the magician embraces the divergence from normalcy and tries to embrace the life of a freak.This propensity to be fond of whats strange and unnatural gave him what he was always looking for the love of a family. The freakishness was what defined the people who were in the fair the people whom, as based on their narra tives and recollections of Henry loved and cared for the magician in the way that his family failed to do so. In the narratives of Rudy the Strongman, Jenny the Ossified Girl and JJ the Barker, the life of Henry was delivered not only to deliberately emphasize the horrors of the magicians life.Rather, through their narrations, Henry was given more than pity. The circus denizens sympathized with their friend and even honour him by saying that In the end, Henry was a man with two stories one story was about revenge, and the other was about love. In Henrys life, Marianne was both his mothers and his sisters substitute. Through her, the author was able to emphasize an important theme that he tried to present in the story Its about getting (a) family, losing (a) family. All of the stories presented are about family.Henry loses one family, but in the end he gets another since the circus becomes a family in itself, where the freaks are able to live a normal life with each other and lov e each other as real people, where their similarities are more important than their differences. Marianne was the supposed fulfillment to Henrys final vision which is to gain that final ideal of community and family and being a part of the world. References Sobsey, Adam (2007). Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician The new novel from Chapel Hills Daniel Wallace. Published 25 Jul 2007 (Retrieved April 6, 2009 from http//www.indyweek. com/gyrobase/Content? oid=oid%3A157570) Turner, Daniel Cross (2009). The Magical track down of Fiction An Interview with Daniel Wallace. Published March 2009 (Retrieved April 6, 2009 from http//www. storysouth. com/2009/03/interview-with-daniel-wallace. html) ____________ (2007). Bigger Fish Swim in Wallaces Latest. Published 19 August 2007 in the Mobile recital (Retrieved April 6, 2009 from http//www. weirdplots. com/2007/08/that-old-multicolored-magic. html) Wallace, Daniel (2007). Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. Doubleday. 257 pp.