47 pages • 1 hour read
Jim StovallThe Ultimate Gift
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Hamilton, Hamilton, & Hamilton
Content Warning: This book sometimes engages in ableist and stereotypical views of disability, particularly blindness. It sometimes trivializes these disabilities. The book contains depictions of foster homes and may engage in stereotypical ideas of adoptive families. It contains references to death by suicide.
The posh law offices of Hamilton, Hamilton, & Hamilton are located in Boston. Founder Theodore Hamilton, his son, and grandson preside over a firm that’s one of the most powerful and prestigious in Massachusetts and handles cases for US presidents, industrial tycoons, and other elite clients. Jason’s monthly tasks begin around the “massive” table in the conference room. A large TV airs Red’s videotaped assignments as Hamilton, assisted by Hastings, performs the duties of Red Stevens’s executor.
The offices are meant to signal the intimidating respectability and power of the firm, though this is lost on the arrogant, spoiled Jason. As the months progress and Jason mellows, the law offices become a sanctuary where he can discuss what he’s learned, receive mentoring, and bond with Hamilton and Hastings in friendship. The offices at first seem to epitomize materialism and wealth but by the end are the source of Jason’s tasks and the ultimate “gift” that he receives, subverting reader expectations.
Red Stevens’s Home for Boys
Deep in the Maine woods is the Red Stevens Home for Boys, where troubled youth live together in an informal extended family. They help with chores, engage in athletics, study, and bond with each other. Nathan, a former resident and successful pro athlete, mentors the kids, and he helps Jason learn to be a valuable houseparent to the boys. The Home represents the kind of outreach that Red and his charitable fund can achieve; it also symbolizes the gift of family and that families don’t have to be biological to still be families. The home is paralleled with the inheritance Red bestows on his family. Just as money, in the novel’s view, is worthless if one only sits upon it and is passive towards it, family is not valuable if one does not actively engage in it. Biological family is not necessarily valuable to someone; family requires an active engagement, a spirit of helping and loving one another, and thus the home demonstrates that non-biological families have the same value as biological ones. Family is about love and not simply entitlement, as Red’s family, which seems to have no connection to one other, indicates.
The Ultimate Gift
The “ultimate gift” is love. Red’s purpose in making Jason run a gauntlet of challenges is to wash away the young man’s selfish alienation and inspire in him instead a yearning to contribute to others. Red achieves this, month by month, with lessons that point Jason toward the biggest reward in life, that of loving others. This gift of loving compassion for others and for life itself gets lost, in the novel’s view, when people become greedy and otherwise self-involved. Red revives Jason’s natural, God-given feeling of love by bringing him face-to-face with the struggles and suffering of others, helping him discover the joys of giving with love and teaching him the habits that enhance an ongoing, happy generosity.
Love for others and for life thus becomes the end point of Jason’s journey. Empowered with that feeling, Jason now reaches out in a life of contribution.
Videotapes
Part of Red Stevens’s will consists of a series of videotapes that record Red’s directives to Jason. Each month, one of the tapes is aired on a big-screen TV in the conference room of Hamilton’s law firm. Each tape contains Red’s instructions on what Jason is to achieve during a given month of the year-long experiment in character-building. The instructions are well thought-out and wise. As he listens, Jason develops a new and better relationship to the memory of his grand-uncle. In following the taped instructions, Jason receives the greatest gift of all, a love for people and a desire to share with them friendship and service.
The videotapes are an unusual literary device that presents a deceased individual in a way that makes him seem transcendently alive. Hamilton several times expresses his joy at being able to see Red once again, and he knows that Red’s positive friendship will remain ever-present in his own life. The videotapes thus symbolize the ongoing value of friendships long after those friends have gone away. They also symbolize the lessons one’s passing can provide to others.
