Faith and The Good Thing through the Lens of Magical Realism - Essay Example

The good thing is like a mythical creature whose existence is based on a person’s prerogative to believe. Just like Henry Ford’s famous quotation which states that if you think you could do a thing or not, you are right.

The good thing through the pages

            The good thing happened when a character in the story failed to commit suicide. He purchased an economy bottle of rat poison, a long rope, an old .45, and a gallon of kerosene. He tied himself to a rope, drenched himself in kerosene, drank the rat poison, and aimed the gun right on his head to shoot his brain. As he pulled the trigger, The Good Thing happened. Instead of blowing his brain off, the bullet cut the rope, making him fall into the river, extinguishing the fire brought by the kerosene and the gunshot. After the river filled his lungs with water, he gagged up all the rat poison he swallowed. And that is the power of The Good Thing.

            In Charles Johnson’s fiction, Faith and The Good Thing, the lines uttered by the characters were written in an African-American style of language. That is, applying Holly Martin’s theory of magical realism—a mode of writing that is especially suited to multicultural works. The author is African-American, writing for a broad spectrum of audiences. 

Faith and the good thing in between cultures

            The language he used signifies the convergence between two cultures, that is, his being African-American and the world of his audiences. Johnson used the theory of collective assemblage of enunciation, as stated in Martin’s Writing Between Cultures. He used his language in order to represent not himself, but the group he belongs to. The multicultural struggle present in the making of the fiction occurs naturally for those who need to reconcile living in two different cultures, such as Johnson. The need for reading Martin’s Magical Realism is indeed a necessity in order for the readers to know and to think what the author, Johnson, means in his fiction. He also used some mathematical equation to represent the number of paths a person could or might take in order to find The Good Thing, which could only be found by gaining experiences in life.

            In Johnson’s work, the theory of magical realism is being implemented especially in the scene wherein Faith and the wherewith were conversing on how one can identify and seek The

Good Thing. In addition, the were witch and Faith best describe how ironic life is—the good searching for truth in the bad and awful side of humanity which captures a little bit of humor in the story.

            The wherewith, being able to make Faith believe that The Good Thing is a subjective thought, is the trickster in the story.  Tricksters play a significant role in novels, which existed in folklores and are still being used in modern literature. According to Martin, these tricksters are often portrayed as mythical creatures and animals that shapeshift in order to deceive the other characters in the story.

            In Johnson’s Faith and The Good Thing, the wherewith did not shapeshift, but rather played tricks on Faith which deceived her, not knowing that they were witch is also Imani, Kujichagulia’s wife. In the story, the wherewith tried to outwit Faith, by simply not answering questions directly and making Faith think more critically. It came to a point wherein Faith was asking for a logical truth behind The Good Thing, and where it was, and if it has been found, or was it forever lost. They were with just answered that there are many types of logical truth such as Aristotelian logic, transcendental logic, phenomenological logic, dialectical materialist logic, symbolic logic, and instrumentalist logic.  And it only caused Faith to see for herself where The Good Thing is hidden, or if it is meant to be found.