A Walk to Remember

Jamie’s Bible is a prized possession that she carries with her everywhere, and is a key motif in the novel. To outsiders, it is a marker of both her religious devoutness and her eccentricity. When Landon is going to take her to the homecoming dance, he is relieved that “at least she wasn’t planning on bringing her Bible” (38), because it would have shown her as a freak in his eyes, and embarrassed him. Jamie’s Bible-carrying, coupled with her other good deeds, have the effect of making her peers feel that they are continually guilty.

However, the truth of Jamie’s Bible, which is “old and the cover was kind of ratty looking” (84), is that it belonged to her dead mother. The Bible was given to Jamie’s parents at their wedding, and her mother “‘read it all the time, especially whenever she was going through a hard time in her life” (85). The Bible was in the hospital when Jamie’s mother died in childbirth. Jamie, who knows that Hegbert carried both her and the Bible home with him, feels that “[i]t just gives me a way to … to be part of her” (85). When Jamie gifts Landon the Bible, she is arguably performing a similar gesture and hopes that the book’s words, in addition to her own, will be part of him after she dies.