ENGL 4310

Frankly, “The Lame Shall Enter First” disturbed me on so many levels that it makes it very difficult for me to talk about it, so I am going to touch on a relatively safe issue that the story brings up and that is to fix your own life before you try fixing others.

Sheppard dismisses his son Norton for being “selfish” for wallowing in his sadness over his mother’s death and feels that because his wife “had been dead for over a year” his son’s “grief should not last so long” (p. 597). The irony of course is that Sheppard himself is very selfish and grief-stricken. Sheppard, instead of helping his son, buries himself in his work so he can ignore his own feelings. By overlooking his son’s feelings he makes it so he does not have to face his own grief.

While neglecting his own son, Sheppard tries to be a surrogate father to Johnson. Johnson, though a very misguided and malicious youth, is not the kid who needs saving. Yet, Sheppard’s “every action had been selfless, his one aim had been to save Johnson for some decent kind of service, he had not spared himself, he had sacrificed his reputation, he had done more for Johnson than he had done for his own child” (p. 631). While Sheppard was busy trying to fill the role of mentor for Johnson, Johnson became the mentor that Norton was so desperately seeking for his life, to tragic results. Had Sheppard not just ignored his “selfish” son’s questions about his mother’s death and the afterlife, had he just been willing to talk to Norton, Norton would not have found refuge in Johnson’s philosophies. But unfortunately, Sheppard’s epiphany that he should “be mother and father” to Norton and his resolution that “he would make everything up to him” (p. 632) comes too late for him to save his true son, the one that needed his help from the beginning.