The Shack By William Paul Young

My purpose in reading this book was to find the answer to one of the most important questions: Why do we have to face so much suffering in our lives? Everyday we face hardship, pain, and hurt, but we never know what the true meaning of suffering. Some say that it’s just life, and the sooner you accept this, the less you will suffer. But another view is through the Christian lens: we must face trials and tribulations to test our faith in and love for God.

“Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trials, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.”
James 1:12

The Shack by William Paul Young is a story about Mack and how his faith is tested by the murder of his daughter. The story begins with Mack in his house during a snowstorm, receiving a note in his mailbox from “Papa,” which said

“Mackenzie,
It’s been a while. I’ve missed you. I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together.
Papa”

When Mack received that note he was confused because he had no relationship with his abusive father since he left his home at the age of 13. The action in this first chapter starts off very slow, but then gets interesting when Mack narrates events from his childhood, including his experiences of his abusive alcoholic father, on the one hand, and what it meant to go to church as a child, on the other. Mack believed in God until his neighbor told him to pray for his father. When he went to church that Sunday, he went up to pray for his father, but the abuse persisted. As an adult, Mack met the love of his life, Nan, a strong believer in God, who she called Papa. Nan persuaded Mack to come back to church and to change for the better. Recalling this detail, Mack considered that the note may be from God.

Mack remembers a camping trip on which he took three of his children. The day that they were going back home, two of his children were in a canoe on the river when it flipped and the children almost drowned. Mack left his youngest daughter, Missy, alone at their campsite as he rushed to the water and freed his son from the canoe’s webbing. After Mack saves his children, he returned and finds that Missy is missing. The police and FBI searched for Missy who was abducted and murdered by a serial killer known as the “Little Ladykiller”. The police found that Missy was taken to an abandoned shack in the woods. There, they found Missy’s bloodied clothes, but not her body. Mack then goes into what he calls “The Great Sadness,” because of the loss of his youngest daughter.

When Mack finds the letter, he goes to the shack where he finds an amazingly beautiful scene. In Mack finds himself face to face with the Holy Trinity.
After all is said and done, Mack was understood the purpose of the death of his daughter and learned to forgive.
I found myself able to understand that the purpose of why we face so many trials and tribulations is because God wants to know the strength of our love and faith in him. Also, we must forgive not only others, but also ourselves for the things we have done in our lives. Mack was tested because God wanted to strengthen his faith. The first time Mack’s faith was tested by his abusive father, he failed. God wanted to see if his faith was as strong as Mack thought it was when he met Nan, who brought him back to God.
I have learned that God will always test us to see who his children really are. I was tested and I failed. Reading The Shack, I have learned that I have to strengthen my faith and lean on God throughout all of my problems. No matter how hard the trial is I have to remain strong in my faith. Just as James 1:12 says,

“Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trials, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.”

When we remain faithful, trust, and believe in God’s work, God would answer all of our questions, doubts and fears

Controlling Values

The Shack By William Paul Young

Why do things happen in our lives that are hard to deal with?
When I started The Shack I was a submissive reader mainly because I knew that this book had to do with a loss of a love one and losing faith in God. I was nervous and scared to read The Shack because I am on the same road as Mack with losing my faith after a loss I faced. I felt that this book would open old wounds and make me question my faith even more. I was reading this book understand why things that are hard to deal with happen in our lives.
In questioning myself I started thinking that if I had questions about why things happen, then Mack was surely asking the same things I was. Reading the book I felt that the controlling value I started with fit well with what the story is about. The premise was “what happens to people’s faith when they lose a love one?” My original controlling values were,

The more we question why things happen, the more we face harder problems

We tend to fall into a great depression when someone we love is taken from us either too quickly or too early in life. One thing is for sure: we never understand why. When we talked about how Missy’s innocence was taken by the little Ladykiller and how Mack had lost his faith do to the lost of his daughter, Sofia mentioned a story that Mack told Missy about a chief daughter,

“The tribe was suffering of an awful innocence. The cure for the illness was one of the chief’s daughters (an innocent), must sacrifice themselves, and die. The daughters sacrifice leads to a cure for the illness, a loss of an innocent. Then on page 34, Mack’s 6 year old daughter, Missy is described and portrayed as being innocent, and is eventually kidnapped and murder. Another recurring instance of losing innocent.”

Mack’s innocence was damaged as a child until the age of thirteen when he left home. Mack questioned why his father was the way he was when he was drunk. Mack needed to understand that our faith is always tested when we are in a relationship with God. No matter how innocent we may be, we are all questioned by God, just as Missy questioned Mack about Jesus sacrificed himself for our salvation. Mack eventually understood that his daughter was a sacrifice, just as Jesus was. As I was reading, I noticed that when Mack took the chance to see why he was told to go to the shack, he met the Holy Trinity who helped him understand and make sense of why things happen. This is where I saw the controlling value at play. I feel that the controlling value that we came up in class was very good, but it was not where it needed to be to show the true meaning of the story and the message in it.

The context and purpose that our group came up with was that keeping a closed mind leads to stunted personal growth and causes you to lose touch with reality. These really did not fit in with the story because the story is about questioning ourselves, our beliefs, questioning God, and why things happen to us. In the beginning of The Shack we quickly see that faith is challenged not only by God, but by us, too. Mack challenges his faith in God when his prayers for his father went unanswered. The controlling value should have focused more on what happens when we question and challenge God and go our own way instead of following him.
In a comment, Rachel said,

“One of the controlling values you mentioned is “maintaining his belief system preserve your innocence and keeps you safe for negative occurrences.” Although Mack preserved his belief system, it did not preserve his innocence nor keep him safe from negative occurrences. He also did not open his mind and widen his perspective or beliefs. His beliefs remain the same throughout the text despite the suffering he experiences. Instead, he comes to an understanding of suffering as an opportunity for grace.”

Even though Rachel may be somewhat right with her comment, we need to see why Mack did not preserve his innocence or why innocence did not keep him safe from negative occurrences. Mack was damaged as a child. He had to grow up fast because what he wanted from God was not answered. He took his frustration out on God and ran away from Him. When we abandon God we experience more negative occurrences that lead us back to him. Mack had a second chance when he met Nan who was a strong believer in God and prayer. With the help of Nan, Mack was able to regain his faith in God. Mack trusted God again and again, God tested him with the death of Missy. Mack failed because he could not understand why he was facing so many negative occurrences. In beginning of the story, Mack maintained his belief system, thus preserving his innocence through his father’s abuse until the day he confessed told the priest about his father and was beaten for two days straight. I believe that Mack would not have gone through the struggles s of his abusive father and losing his daughter if he would have trusted in the Lord and not lost his faith. God would have remained faithful to Mack. It says in 1 Peter 5:10:

“And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.”

When we read this book, we need to open our eyes and mind to understand both the book and the Bible. The suffering that Mack has gone through serves a purpose and that purpose is to show us that we have to suffer to strengthen our faith and make us stronger in our faith in God. So why do things happen in our lives that are hard to deal with? We are placed in this world to learn from hardship because if we do not learn, we will never find answers to why we deal with pain. We lose loved ones so that we can see that with God, everything is possible when we maintain a strong faith in God.

Form and Genre

Why do we question the things that God make us face everyday?
In our lives we are going to face the same issues many times until we learn from it. The same issues will manifest in our lives in different ways until we find a way to cope that will help us see and understand the reasoning.

The Shack’s form of writing was very well thought out. It used the repetitive form. We constantly see the same thing repeated many times. Sofia explained that she saw the repetitive form in her blog.

“The Shack would fit right in, hook, line and sinker. In a mere thirteen pages Young manages to supply you with four occurrences of symbolism. With repetitive form fresh in my head,
the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises.”

The repetitive form

“is the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises.” This is also understood as a motif.” (Kopp)

The narrator shows us Mack’s childhood, how he and his mother were abused by his drunken father. But come Sunday, his father was the holiest of men. In my understanding, his father had a split personality. As a child Mack was shown to have faith and prayed for his father. Mack was just an innocent child who not only was abused himself, but watched his mother be abused. He was robbed from his innocence as a child. Same goes for his youngest daughter. Missy was a child of God, just as Mack was. Missy was only six years old. She was the light in Mack’s eyes. In losing her, he lost the only little hope and faith he had in God. We see Missy’s innocence when she says,

“Okay! Hold me close. G’night, Daddy. I love you.” And she was out, drifting deep into a sound sleep with only good and sweet dreams”(34).

When we picture a child sleeping, we see smiles and joy in their faces. They rest like little angels on a wonderful comfy cloud. The repetitive form is showing how both Mack and Missy started in church, believing and placing their faith in God and how God took the innocence from them with abuse and loss.

Something that we learn in church is that we have to sacrifice a lot in life to get what we want. We have to make sacrifices to get something in return. For example, in the story that Mack told Missy, the chief’s daughter who gave her life to save her people. This story was introduced in the beginning of the book where Mack talks about the ancient legend.

“The village was sick, and there was no cure. Each day more and more villagers were dying. The villagers eldest medicine man had predicted a prophecy, an illness that could be stopped only if a pure and innocent daughter of the chief would willingly give up her life for her people. In order to fulfill the prophecy, she must voluntarily climb to a cliff above the Big River and from there jump to her death on the rocks below”(30).

The reason we see so much of repetition on the idea of innocence is because Young is trying to show us that no matter how innocent or good you are, it will not stop you from facing tribulations and pain. Through trials, our faith is proven. We are tested and go through fire to show that our faith remains strong. Young uses innocence to show that despite struggles with abuse, death, and sickness, they still were strong in their faith.

The repetition of innocence is shown many times in the book. I also found the qualitative progressive form to be evident. In the qualitative progressive form,

“quantity is obvious and measurable; qualities are inferred and felt, and thus evoke moods. A given mood, once it is present, allows us to enter another mood, or state of mind, that might follow” (Kopp).

We see the qualitative progressive form from the beginning of the story. We immediately feel the pain that Mack felt losing his daughter and the anger he had toward God for his daughter’s death. We also felt that same pain and anger manifest in the flashbacks of when his drunk father beat him:

“When Mack was thirteen, he confided to a camp counselor, on a spiritual retreat about his father’s abuse. The camp counselor, a buddy of Mack’s father, breaks Mack’s trust. Mack’s father acted quickly to teach Mack a lesson. He tied Mack to a tree out back, for two days, whipping Mack whenever he was sober enough to stand up” (10).

When Mack talks about being beating I felt like I could see him being beaten and felt the pain. It’s like when you watch it on television: you get this knot in your stomach that makes you angry and hate the person for doing this to a young innocent child who just wanted his father to be healed from the sickest disease of alcoholism.

The Shack was written in a way that makes the reader see the same events and feel the same feelings over and over again. Through the telling of Mack’s troubled life, in his tumultuous childhood and adulthood, and his reconnection with God, everyone who reads this book gets a sense of different emotions from pain, hurt, anger, sadness to joy and understanding.

Intertextual Codes

If God is a loving God why does he make his children go through hardships?

As Christians, we need to face many hardships to understand the message and purpose behind God’s punishment or trials. The Shack can be portrayed as many hardships in loss of loved ones, trust, and faith. The symbolic code, cultural code and proairetic code help us have a better understanding as to why The Shack is written in codes that teach us the meaning of the story. I felt that the story was portrayed in a proairetic code, which:

“Determines the causal (cause and effect), narrative sequence and syntagmatic progression. This is the denotative, mimetic dimension of the text, wherein the reader encounters the juxtaposition of events, creates a connection between the two that is already presupposed in the unfolding action, which allows the reader to predict subsequent events that follow from their causes” (Kopp).

The Shack shows a cause and effect. A question that gives us grounds for the causal progression to occur is this: if God is a loving God, why does he put his children to go through hardship? Through cause and effect, this question is answered. One cause in the book is Missy’s abduction and murder. The second is Mack’s abusive father. he effect was his anger against God and his loss of faith. The whole narrative point is to show the reader that despite trials and tribulations, we cannot let our faith falter. We need to remain faithful to God and he will supply our needs.

Rachel wrote an amazing blog on why she believes the story used cultural codes. She talked about what the Bible says about good and evil. n She discussed how God was shown to be a judgmental and punishing God and Jesus was seen as loving, accepting, and forgiving. She compared it to Mack and his situation that he was facing. The Shack uses cultural codes because we can compare it to the Christian codes of life. It’s a cultural code because cultural codes,

“speak the familiar ‘truths’ of the existing cultural order, repeat what has ‘always been already read, seen, done, experienced.”

Cultural codes in The Shack are shown through ongoing things we face and learn in our everyday life. Which connects to the proairetic code because we are feeling the shame of losing our faith in God and questioning his doing, even though The Bible says that we will face many difficult situations in life. Mack loses his faith and his Christian beliefs are tested; we see and experience this everyday. This is why we have to face many hardships– to learn from our experiences. Rachel’s blog show us that Mack has tried to do his best to show God that he has faith and believes in him, but his childhood abuse caused him to lose his faith in God. When Mack lost his daughter, Mack once again lost his faith in God and became angry and left God’s side once again. When Mack met Papa in person, he finally understood the meaning of forgiveness.
This is a great representation of the proairetic, cultural, and symbolic codes It is a cultural expectation to forgive one another and symbolic because we teach others that when we forgive others we are able to forgive and move on without any pain or hurt. When Mack was able to forgive The Little Ladykiller, he could then forgive himself for turning away from God. With this he was finally able to understand why we are tested and why it is important to remain faithful to God.

The Relationships between Narrators and Addressees

 

Every purpose has a lesson. What is the lesson behind losing behind losing a loved one after you dealt with so much in life?

Lessons are placed in front of us to learn and grow from them, so why are we so resistant to the lessons when the intentions are good? As we learn from these lessons, we learn to understand for whom the message is intended. The Shack was written to touch Christians who have lost themselves and their faith due to a lost of a loved one. In his blog, Enrico said,

“The book seems to be directed more towards a Christian audience, which is fine, still there has to be something for the everyday reader to grab onto.”

Of course if you are someone who has never lost a loved one who was close to you then this book is not for you. But if you are in my shoes, where I lost the closest person to me, this book will help you understand that in life we need to lose something precious to us so we can see the purpose that God wants to teach us.

I find that the narrator is trying to reach out to the people who have lost the faith in God due to the loss of a family member. I say this because I lost my faith in God the day I lost my grandfather. All my life I went to church and I was taught to put my problems in God’s hands and he would take care of it. That is what I did when my grandfather found out that he had stage 3 cancer: I prayed that God would heal him, I fasted, and begged for the healing of his body. When that day came as my grandfather’s soul was leaving his body so was my faith. I could not understand why God would do this to me, a woman of faith.

To this day, I still cannot understand why, but The Shack has shown me that there is a purpose to everything. The narrator showed me that we need things to happen in our lives, so that we can learn from them and understand that behind the pain comes a plan that would better us spiritually and mentally. He did that by showing us flash back of Mack childhood and his life with Missy, and he explained that no matter the pain we face God never leaves our side, and that we experiences these things as test of our faith and love to God. The narrator found tools to create a relationship with the audience through emotions, the story shows us and brings out of us all kinds of emotions of anger, hatred, disgust, sadness and at the end joy and peace. The narrator’s purpose was to open the eyes of people who have loss a loved one. This is shown through Mack’s lack of faith and the easing of his doubts through meeting the Holy Trinity.

“You’re nowhere to be found! You’ve never been around when I’ve needed you—not when I was a little boy, not when I lost Missy. Not now! Some ‘Papa’ you are!’ ” (75).

I find myself being a submissive reader because I am Mack and Mack is me. We have questioned God and were hesitant to go back to him. We continue to face hardship for not obeying God and his purpose. We have faced trials and tribulations many times and failed, and we need to understanding that God has a purpose for us and our life.

Although I disagree with Enrico’s comment, I do agree that Willie is are man behind the scene. You could feel the connection between Mack and Willie
In the begin of the story it says,

“I have known Mack for a bit more than twenty years” (xi).

Willie tells us the role he plays in Mack’s life and in the story. He says,

“What you are about to read is the best Mack can remember about what happened. This is his story, not mine, so the few times I show up, I’ll refer to myself in the third person—from Mack’s point of view” (xviii).

When you have a close friend that is everywhere with you they know everything about you. They know every hardship and every happy moment in our life. I know that my best friend knows everything about me the ins and out, my greatest moments and my bad moments. For Mack to have a friend like that helps us see a different view on who Mack is, not just who Mack says he is.

This book has helped me become more opened minded to what I have faced in my life. I am more willing to see the bigger picture and understand the purpose to all of my suffering.

 

Final Reflection

I went to Holy Name School in Camden NJ. I was there from kindergarten to 8th grade and I never took a reading class. My mom always said I did not know how to read, write or spell because in school we were never given courses that only focus on those. For instance, in middle school they gave me classes like Language Arts, where all we did was take tests on short readings I do not remember ever taking a class focused solely on t writing, reading, and spelling. This is the reason I stand where I am today.

During the years when I was told I to read a book because we had a test, I would just skim through it or buy the CliffsNotes. Taking this class has taught me the importance of reading to truly understand what I read. How Writers Read opened my mind to reading in great detail. It has helped me try to find the meaning behind the writing and understand what the author is saying to their audience.

Throughout the semester, I have learned to look for form and genre, intertextual codes and the relationship between narrators and the addressees. When I first read Slade House, I was very resistant. But as Drew began talking about all three different levels of reading, my understanding of reading as a writer began to expand. As I read through the book I started noticing patterns of repetition. For example, every time someone was going to die, they would have someone walking or running across them wearing yellow. I started noticing this in every chapter. It helped me read and look through the words. I was seeing that every time, there was hint to the next chapter and a meaning to each thing that would happen.

For my book, even though I did find it boring, I noticed that it was more into helping people who have lost a loved one who was important. When it came to reading The Shack I feel like it made it easier to look for the meaning of the story. My purpose in reading this book was to find answers. Although I am still having trouble understanding why things happen, I know for a fact that for me to understand, I need to forgive God for taking my grandfather and forgive myself for losing my faith in the only man who has had my back since before time–God.

I have found a new enjoyment in reading that I never thought I would have. When I first met Drew, I argued that I would not read because I hated reading. He told me to give it a chance, that I would learn new thinking that would change my mind in reading books. I appreciate everything I have learned these semester. I feel that it made me grow as a reader and writer and appreciate the work writers put into their writing.