43 pages • 1 hour read
William P. YoungThe Shack
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Mackenzie Allen Phillips (Mack)
Content Warning: The entry on Mackenzie Allen Phillips references violence against children.
Mack is the husband of Nannette (Nan) and the father of five children: Jon, Tyler, Josh, Kate, and Missy. He is in his early fifties during most of the story’s narrative—a capable and practical man who is good at many things but admits that handling emotions and relationships is not among his skills. His friend Willie writes of him, “[I]n a world of talkers, Mack is a thinker and a doer” (9). He believes in God and occasionally attends church, but he has often struggled to have a faith as deeply personal as his wife’s. He cannot relate well to Nan’s intimate association with God as “Papa” due to emotional and physical trauma from an abusive father, who beat Mack so badly in his early teenage years that he ran away for good. He lived a wandering life for much of his young adulthood, working overseas, attending seminary in Australia, and even getting involved in a foreign conflict before returning to the US and settling down with Nan.
The crisis in Mack’s adult life comes when his youngest daughter, Missy, is kidnapped and killed while on a family camping trip. This plunges him and his family into a season of grief and pain that they call “the Great Sadness.” In the aftermath of this loss, Mack feels even more distance in his relationship with God, not understanding how God could possibly allow this tragedy to happen.
The torylinee of The Shack, building off the backstory of “the Great Sadness,” follows the development of Mack’s new perceptions about himself, life, and God, as aided by his conversations with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. He gradually comes to understand God’s love for both him and Missy, even in the midst of their tragic circumstances. By the end of the book, he can even reconcile with his father and take the first steps towards forgiving his daughter’s murderer. The garden outside the shack illustrates the transformation being wrought in Mack’s life, and after he has cleared space in the garden and laid his daughter’s remains to rest there, the garden blooms with the new life of a beautiful flowering tree. Upon his return in the final chapter, his inner transformation brings hope and healing to others in his family.
Papa
Papa is The Shack’s representation of God the Father, one of the persons of the Trinity. For most of the book, Papa takes on the aspect of “a large beaming African American woman” (82), joyful and gentle and with an air of patient mothering about her. This character introduces herself as Elousia, which Jesus later explains is a portmanteau of two words for “God” and “being,” but she invites Mack to refer to her as “Papa,” which becomes her normal designation throughout the novel. Papa first enters the story as the author of the mysterious note that invites Mack to come to the shack, but it is not until his arrival there that he meets her in person. Only once in the story does Papa’s outer aspect change: when he appears as an older, dignified Indigenous American man to guide Mack to the location of Missy’s body near the end of his weekend at the shack.
Papa lives in close and intimate relationship with Jesus and Sarayu—so close that in several cases they express the fact that when one is present, they are all present. She denies holding any hierarchical authority over the other two members of the Trinity, instead expressing their relationship as a circle of love. Papa’s character does not experience any inner development or transformation. As a representation of God, Papa is there not to change but to be a catalyst for Mack’s changes, serving as a voice of wisdom, truth, and counsel.
Jesus
In The Shack, the character of Jesus is the historical Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians have traditionally understood as the human incarnation of the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. Papa describes this traditional understanding in one of her first conversations with Mack, saying, “Although by nature he is fully God, Jesus is fully human and lives as such” (99). When Jesus appears in the novel, his physical appearance matches the historical, cultural, and ethnic setting in which he lived: He is a Middle Eastern carpenter, and he even jokes about the size of the nose he inherited: “[…] in fact, most of the men on my mom’s side had big noses” (111). Other references to his earthly life include mentions of his healing ministry and his sacrificial death on a cross. As in traditional Christian theology, The Shack depicts the crucifixion as the pivotal moment in the story of God’s plan; it even features in Mack’s discussions with his children before Missy’s death.
Early on in Mack’s encounter with God at the shack, Mack finds Jesus the easiest of the three persons of the Trinity to relate to, and so the dialogues with Jesus revolve around Mack’s attempts to process his interactions with the other two. As Mack’s experiences with Jesus continue, however, Jesus takes on an ever more central role in the narrative. He walks across the water of the lake with Mack, and then Mack sees him playing with Missy and the other children in the vision through the waterfall; through these experiences Mack begins to see Jesus as standing at the center of his relationship with God. In Mack’s Sarayu-empowered vision in Chapter 15, it is Jesus who marks the consummation of the final scene, and it is also Jesus who speaks the divine words of love and affirmation: “Mack, I am especially fond of you” (216).
Sarayu
Sarayu is The Shack’s representation of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. She appears as an Asian woman with an ethereal aspect: “She seemed almost to shimmer […]. It was almost easier to see her out of the corner of [Mack’s] eye that it was to look at her directly” (84). Her name, Sarayu, means “wind” in Sanskrit, which matches the meaning of the biblical words used for the Holy Spirit. Her manner of speaking is also unique, as she insists that the truth of God’s existence and of the nature of the universe is more a matter of verbs that nouns: “[…] if the universe is only a mass of nouns, it is dead. Unless ‘I am,’ there are no verbs, and verbs are what makes the universe alive” (204).
Sarayu has several functions in the narrative, both as a member of the Trinity and on her own. She tends a garden outside the cabin, and the garden itself is a symbol of Mack’s soul, growing and unfolding and blooming like a fractal. She also collects Mack’s tears, which she later uses to water the spot in the garden where Missy’s body is laid to rest. By her power, Mack sees things as God sees them, resulting in the mystical vision in which Mack encounters his father and finds reconciliation in that relationship. Sarayu, like the other members of the Trinity, experiences no development or transformation in herself but acts as a major catalyst for Mack’s journey of transformation.
