The Power of Water!

   In all of my days on this Earth, I've never realized the symbolic meaning of rain until I was 13 years old. Now, I can clearly remember my enlightenment after watching a movie. It was as if I had breathed in the sweet air of realization. I thought I was a real big shot then, running to my mother to tell her what I had learned and explaining it to her in a way that she could understand. You know how parents will relish in their child's excitement even if it's for a very small reason? That's what my mother did and it was clear that she already knew the symbolic meaning from the get-go. In Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor, He covers two separate topics in to separate chapters; one being on the rain and the other on baptism. However, I thought that these two subjects fit together hand in hand.
   Rain, baptism, and water, clean. The connection between these things are the effect that they display throughout a novel or movie. What happens when you're submerged into clean water? You come out clean. Think about that metaphorically; The troubled man runs out into the pouring rain, he let's out his frustrations, the rain stops, him mind is free of pain.  Now instead of him going out into the rain, he's going to fall into a river, get knocked out, wake up on land with a free mind because he has lost his memory,so therefore he has no immediate reason to be a troubled man. Both of these chapters deal with the topic of being cleansed and reborn. But, there's more to them than just cleansing.
   Have you ever seen Shawshank Redemption? If you have, then you are probably familiar with the rain scene. Filthy from his time in prison and his own ghosts, Andy escapes and into the the rain, he is jubilant and freed. That moment in the rain symbolized 15 years of imprisonment and impurity, Andy is finally free. He has experienced a rebirth as well. If you think about it, he breaks through the sewer and into a mass of flooded water. Kind of sounds like baptism and rebirth to me. So not only has he been cleansed by the rain, he's escaping prison a brand new man. This changes everything!

  Baptisms, in novels are not always religiously linked, nor do they have to be. There are many stories that include the metaphorical/non-religious form of baptism. Just as long as it follows certain guidelines. The baptism must represent a rebirth, death, change of life, becoming a new person, escaping old life, etc.. Though, not all characters survive baptisms. Foster speaks of a child in Flannery O’Connor 's The River (1955), who witnesses a Sunday baptism going on and decides to do his own baptism by himself. However, the child does not make it and in Foster's words, the boy went to " join God on his own." This type of baptism sounds more like drowning, right? That's because is is drowning, In fact, drowning happens to be apart of the whole rebirth process. The character might die or not. If the character survives the drown, it represents, a new chapter in the characters life or in the story.

 The symbols of water and baptism have long been taken both metaphorically and literally. No doubt, that water has the power to wash away all the pain that needs to be healed. It's all too clear, once you know what to expect. There will always be a change going on in a movie and in literature, you just need to be able to identify the signs. If a story line included no form of metaphorical growth, would it be a good one? Would it be a story that I want to spend my time with and get lost in? I don't know, I've never heard of one, but if you have... Let me know!