Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro Summarry by: Carlo

In this story, Brillantes confronts the most important questions of our lives as Christians Does paragon exist? If so, what is the nature of idol? I remember Tim specialiseing me that Brillantes succeeds in telling a compel story because he never preaches or subverts. That he allows the reader to experience, quite an than solve, the problem of matinee idols presence or absence. The story is deceivingly simple An aging medical heal and his young password atomic number 18 called in the middle of the night to minister to a poor family whose neonate pander has a terminal case of tetanus.The journey towards the familys home, however, counts to matter on a different level when it likewise becomes a eldritch journey, most especially for Dr. Lazaro, whose beliefs about and disbelief in theology, faith, love, and time seem to haunt him with a pressurized intensity and all because he sees a coarse chasm between him and Ben, his male child, in terms of how they see life He has upset so much faith in God and life, while Ben captive on becoming a priest seems so infuriatingly fresh and positive.He has also lost his faith because he has been a witness to countless, seemingly hit-or-miss deaths in that respect is a patient with cancer, whose racking nuisance even morphine cant assuage any much on that point is the baby who is instantaneously dying from tetanus but most of all, there was his eldest son who, we later learn, committed suicide. From the latter, the Lazaro family died to each other as well. It made the doctor focus mechanically on his job, just to forget the pain, and his wife became more immersed in religion than in family.For Dr. Lazaro, what kind of God would allow pain? What kind of God would kill a baby? What kind of God would take away a son? Is there really a God? (Many of the students invariably answer that perhaps God allowed this to happen to runnel their faith. I happen to believe this as well, but I come out for them anot her gray area That may be true, but tell that to a dying man in excruciating pain, or to a father who has tragically lost his child. Sir, you are in pain because God is testing your faith. Seems cruel, isnt it? ) These questions are compounded by the images and symbols that are adequate throughout the story that of loss, distance, emptiness, and dark ominousness a view of the stars, the country darkness, the lights on the distant highway at the edge of townsfolk, a humming of wires, as though darkness had added to the distance between the house in town and the station beyond the summer fields, the long journey to Nambalan, the sleeping town, the pine away streets, the plaza empty in the moonlight. And being the quintessential formalist narrative, the story contains some(prenominal) symbolism understood best through close-reading. There is, for one, the realization that Dr. Lazaro represents a kind of living dead. Besides the zombie characteristic invoked in the setoff paragrap h, his name easily evokes the Biblical dead man brought to life Lazarus. There are also the parallels of the baby and Dr. Lazaro that while the baby has actual tetanus, Dr.Lazarus, on the other hand, has tetanus of the soul It was as though indifference were an transmittance that had entered his blood it was everywhere in his body. He needs new life, we presently realize, and he needs to be resurrected from the dead. In a sense, his journey to Nambalan with his son becomes a journey in a quest for redemption he has to save the body, to save an idea of himself and his place in the world. But there is also that other metaphor of God as a empty God. As a doctor, Dr. Lazaro heals, which is very God-like, if you think about it.In one scene, Esteban, the babys bewildered father, calls the doctor over the anticipate, like the prayer of a desperate man to God. The distance between Esteban and Dr. Lazaro, through the humming of the phone wires and the resulting bad connection, is a go od metaphor for the distance between God and man. Can we call God? What if there is a busy maneuver? the story seems to say. But finally, Dr. Lazaro cannot heal the sick baby, who eventually dies and we are left-hand(a) with this unsettling question What does this say about the Great Healer?And yet, by the finish up of the story, it is spirituality that saves. As the defeated Dr. Lazaro leaves the dead baby on the mat, he sees his son Ben, the hopeful priest-to-be, go to the babys side and get it the final sacrament of Extreme Unction. And he finally sees his darkness, and his sons saving light. Dr. Lazaros epiphany also becomes ours, but his quickly ends with abortive fear. In what is one of the most famous endings in Philippine literature. Like love, there was only so much time.