This story bears out that idea, showing that religion doesn't have a monopoly on mystery, that people don't need the Bible when they're going through hell. Shy, a troubled British teen in the mid-1990s, has been sent to the Last Chance boarding school and has loaded his rucksack in the middle of the night to break out of his dorm and escape the. As the Boys say later in the novel: "We miss our Mum, we love our Dad, we/wave at crows./It's not that weird." In the 1860s, Matthew Arnold entertained the idea that literature could replace religion as a tool to interrogate moral questions and explore the unknown. This apparent "lack" of faith isn't really a lack at all, but rather an opportunity for the characters to create their own language and traditions regarding the ruins of death. While religious people reach for a Bible when bereaved, the characters in Grief, like many, don't appear to subscribe to any sort of faith. Dad openly discusses and bemoans the obviousness of his imaginary friend- of course the Hughes scholar with a wife who suddenly died would choose as his hallucinatory grief counselor the primary symbol of his subject's poetry-but Porter's choice to make the obvious choice offers his characters (and readers) a secular way of dealing with death.
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