Life After Joseph

           Losing someone you care about greatly and cares about you is an overwhelming feeling. One is left to deal with all of the holes that person left in your life and consider what they meant to you. The narrator in Margaret Atwood’s The Sin Eater is having such an experience throughout the short story after the death of Joseph. These thoughts and feelings come to a head during the last portion of the work when the narrator is describing the dream in which she sees Joseph.

            The narrator’s description of Joseph’s skin in the dream as blue is consistent with the description of Krishna, a reincarnation of an Indian deity, from her son’s magazine. Like the picture from the magazine Joseph was adored by many women and also sought after for advice. A previous wife of Joseph remembers that some of the people that he helped looked at him as a god. The dream means something more though. Since Joseph is depicted as similar to a reincarnation, the narrator hopes that he will be reincarnated. However, I believe that she is more rational than that. After all Joseph would say, “Dead is dead.” The narrator laments that after Joseph’s death she no longer has anyone to share her life with. This is the reincarnation she hopes to find: not Joseph himself, but someone of the same spirit with whom she can be open and truthful about her life and problems.

            The cookies from Joseph’s funeral show up again in her dream, this time as Joseph’s sins. In the story the narrator wonders what has happened to Joseph’s sins. At the funeral the narrator is upset that no sin eater has had a meal of “turnips and mash” that Joseph’s sins were transferred to. In the dream his sins are in foods that many people find much more appealing than turnips and mash: cookies that were earlier described to look like something made to please a child. This food choice suggests something about what the narrator thinks of Joseph. She believes that even his sins were not as severe as other peoples. Perhaps she has this belief because he spent so much of his time helping other people, perhaps not. In any case even in his death the narrator is able to place Joseph on a pedestal. She gets the one thing she desires also: the chance to help Joseph by eating his sins. Even though the narrator states that the plate of cookies was too big for her, she was willing to eat it because she knew it wasn’t possible to “send it back” even though she doesn’t end up having to in the dream. For all of the help he has given her, she is willing to help him. Being willing to help others is perhaps the greatest gift Joseph gave her and is a testament to how she feels about him.