Reuben Land occupies an unusual double position in Peace Like a River: he is both the character students most naturally sympathize with and the narrator controlling every piece of information readers receive about the other characters. This dual role makes him a rich subject for a character analysis essay, but it also creates a common trap, since students often write about Reuben as though he were a purely neutral observer rather than an active shaper of the story's meaning. A strong essay assignment on Reuben should push students to hold both roles in view at once rather than treating his narration as simply a transparent window onto events.

Reuben's asthma offers one of the clearest entry points for character analysis, since it functions simultaneously as a realistic physical condition, a recurring symbol, and a plot device that places him at the center of the novel's miracles. Students writing about this element should be encouraged to move beyond simply noting that his breathing improves during moments of crisis, and instead ask what that pattern suggests about his relationship to faith, fear, and his own mortality. A strong essay might argue that Reuben's illness makes him uniquely positioned to narrate a story about miracles, since his own body has already taught him to expect the unexpected. Weaker essays tend to describe the asthma without connecting it to any larger claim about his character.

It is also worth pushing students to consider Reuben's relationship with his father, Jeremiah, since much of Reuben's development as a character is defined by how he interprets his father's apparent capacity for miracles. Some students default to reading Reuben's admiration for Jeremiah uncritically, missing moments where the adult narrator's voice introduces subtle doubt or reflection on his childhood certainty. Encouraging students to locate at least one instance where the narrating adult Reuben complicates the child Reuben's straightforward hero worship of his father produces essays with noticeably more depth than those that treat the father-son relationship as static throughout the book.

Analyzing Reuben as an Unreliable or Selectively Reliable Narrator

A more advanced essay assignment can ask students to evaluate the degree to which Reuben functions as an unreliable narrator, a term many students have encountered but rarely applied with precision to a text like this one. Reuben is not unreliable in the sense of deliberately deceiving readers, but his narration is shaped by the limits of childhood understanding, by retrospective knowledge he did not have at the time, and by his evident reverence for his father, all of which affect what gets emphasized or minimized in his account. Students who can identify specific moments where this selective shaping is visible, rather than simply asserting that "all narrators are unreliable," write essays that engage the actual mechanics of the text.

• Ask students to distinguish Reuben's role as character from his role as narrator.
• Require at least one example of the adult narrator complicating the child's view.
• Push students past describing the asthma toward interpreting its function.
• Have students locate a moment where narration shapes reader sympathy directly.
• Ask whether Reuben's account of Davy changes across the course of the novel.

Grading Essays That Conflate Character and Narrator

The most frequent weakness in student essays on Reuben is a failure to distinguish clearly between claims about Reuben the character and claims about Reuben the narrator, which can produce arguments that contradict themselves without the student noticing. A student might argue in one paragraph that Reuben is naive and easily impressed by his father, and in a later paragraph rely on Reuben's narration as a fully trustworthy source for judging another character's motives, without acknowledging any tension between those two claims. Flagging this specific inconsistency in feedback, rather than simply marking the essay as confused, gives students a concrete skill to apply on their next narrator-focused essay for any text.

A rubric for this assignment should include a specific line addressing whether the student maintains a consistent, defensible position on Reuben's reliability throughout the essay, since this consistency is often what separates a strong analysis from a merely competent one. It also helps to reward students who acknowledge complexity, such as arguing that Reuben is reliable about factual events but less reliable about emotional interpretation, over students who make a blanket claim in either direction without qualification. This kind of nuanced position is harder to write but ultimately reflects a more accurate reading of how narration actually functions in the novel.

Connecting Reuben's Arc to the Novel's Larger Themes

A character analysis essay becomes stronger when it connects Reuben's individual development to the novel's broader concerns rather than treating him as an isolated case study. Reuben's gradual movement from childlike acceptance of his father's miracles toward a more complicated, adult understanding of faith mirrors the novel's own larger argument about the relationship between belief and doubt. Students who can trace this parallel, showing how Reuben's personal arc functions as a smaller version of the novel's central thematic question, write essays that demonstrate a genuinely sophisticated grasp of how character and theme work together in longer fiction.

This connection also gives students a natural bridge into their conclusion, since ending an essay on Reuben by briefly gesturing toward what his arc suggests about the novel's treatment of faith avoids the common trap of a conclusion that merely restates the introduction. Rather than repeating the thesis in slightly different words, students can use the final paragraph to suggest why Reuben's particular version of belief, shaped by illness, loss, and eventual acceptance, matters to the novel's larger argument about how ordinary people make sense of extraordinary events. This kind of ending signals that the student understands the essay as part of a larger interpretive project rather than an isolated exercise.