Resurrection of a Life

Resurrection of a Life Summary | Detailed Summary

"Resurrection of a Life" is William Saroyan's short story of individual human experience and the universal concept of the wish for immortality.

The story, which could almost be called an essay, addresses the author's life during the time he was a ten-year-old paperboy in California during World War I. The author serves as the narrator and begins by saying that "everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends..." Each moment of a human life is as natural as breathing in and breathing out until the moments add up and become the measure of a person's life.

As a paperboy in 1917, the narrator feels as if he is a vital part of life by shouting out the headlines to the people passing on the street. The paper route exposes the young boy to the unsavory side of life as his paper hawking takes him to saloons and whorehouses in addition to the respectable establishments frequented by the wealthy people who regularly buy his papers.

The boy thinks the city itself is ugly, but he revels in some of the people and in the fact that he is alive at this point in time and shares the planet with this particular collection of characters. One of the people the narrator sees frequently is an obese man who sleeps all the time at the Crystal Bar, and the boy cannot understand sleeping through a life. He wonders how that man can be considered alive just as he himself is alive.

The movie theater is another venue the boy frequents, where he can watch human nature both on the screen and off. The narrator muses about the fact that even when the boy he is today is no longer alive, his spirit will still walk these same streets, and he will live again in the shadows and sunlight. This advanced thinking renders school useless for the boy, who is bored with shallow dictates of formal education, preferring to receive his schooling on the streets.

Each morning before daybreak, the narrator visits the San Joaquin Baking Company to buy "chicken bread" for his large, poor family. Any bread that falls on the floor in the bakery cannot be sold in the store, so the owner sells it to customers as food for their chickens. The owner of the bakery is fully aware that the boy has no chickens and is taking the bread home to his family, but he never lets on that he knows the boy's secret. Now the narrator as a man wonders at the grace of this man who allowed the boy his dignity.

The boy's family makes what little money it has by selling newspapers, and they live in a dilapidated house with insects and mice. They do not mind because the family is together, and they have the chicken bread for nourishment.

There comes a day when the boy has mixed feelings between selling papers and preserving his humanity, when he must shout about ten thousand Huns being killed in the war. While the people in the streets revel in the news and buy the papers, the boy wonders about each individual person making up that number of ten thousand and all the human desires, frailties and loves that ended on some obscure battlefields. The narrator remembers attending church as a boy and loving the music and the fine rhetoric but struggling with the existence of a God that would permit suffering, war and death.

At the end of the story, the narrator returns to the present day, and he concentrates on inhaling and exhaling, all a person can really do in life. The savoring of memories keeps a person alive, and the narrator remembers his days as a paperboy. He is glad to have been on the earth at the time that he was. In spite of all the pain, he says, "all I know is that I am alive and glad to be, glad to be of this ugliness and this glory..." The narrator concludes that he does not believe there is any true death and says that there never can be any true death because of his beliefs.