Sacrifice runs through nearly every major relationship and decision in Peace Like a River, from Jeremiah's quiet daily sacrifices raising three children alone to Davy's willingness to risk everything to protect his family, making it a genuinely rich thematic thread for students to trace across the full novel rather than a theme that appears only in a single isolated scene. Because sacrifice takes such different forms across the book, from the dramatic to the mundane, this unit also teaches students an important lesson about how a single theme can manifest in genuinely varied ways within one text, rather than repeating itself identically every time it appears.

A useful starting exercise asks students to brainstorm every instance of sacrifice they can identify across the novel, ranging from the most obvious and dramatic examples to smaller, easily overlooked ones, before sorting these instances into rough categories based on what kind of sacrifice each represents. Students typically identify categories such as physical risk or danger, sacrificed personal ambition or comfort, and sacrificed certainty or control, and this sorting exercise reveals that the novel's treatment of sacrifice is considerably more varied and complex than students might initially assume before undertaking the exercise, since most students initially think only of Davy's dramatic actions rather than considering Jeremiah's quieter, ongoing sacrifices as well.

Jeremiah Land offers particularly rich material for this theme, since his character embodies a kind of sustained, unglamorous sacrifice, raising his children alone after his wife's departure, that receives less dramatic narrative attention than Davy's more obviously eventful choices but arguably shapes the family's daily life more thoroughly and consistently throughout the novel. Pushing students to consider why Enger includes both kinds of sacrifice, the dramatic and the quietly sustained, and what the novel suggests about the relative value or nature of each, produces richer discussion than focusing exclusively on the more obviously dramatic instances of sacrifice that first come to mind for most students during initial brainstorming.

Connecting Sacrifice to the Novel's Treatment of Faith

Because sacrifice carries strong religious resonance, particularly within the Christian tradition the novel draws on explicitly, this theme connects naturally to the unit's broader discussion of faith and miracles, offering students another angle from which to approach the novel's central concerns. Asking students to consider whether the novel presents sacrifice as something that enables or earns miraculous intervention, or whether it presents the two as related but ultimately independent, pushes students toward a more sophisticated thematic argument than a simpler claim that sacrifice and faith are "connected" without specifying exactly how that connection functions within the novel's own internal logic.

• Brainstorm and sort every instance of sacrifice across dramatic and quiet categories.
• Compare Jeremiah's sustained sacrifice to Davy's more dramatic, singular choice.
• Ask whether the novel presents sacrifice as connected to or independent of miracles.
• Identify at least one moment where a character's sacrifice goes unrewarded.
• Discuss how Swede's sacrifice, if any, differs in kind from her father's or brother's.

Addressing Sacrifice That Goes Unrewarded

A genuinely sophisticated version of this unit pushes students to grapple with moments where a character's sacrifice does not lead to a clear, positive outcome, since a purely celebratory reading of sacrifice as always ultimately rewarded oversimplifies what the novel actually presents across its full arc. Identifying and discussing at least one instance where sacrifice results in genuine, lasting loss rather than eventual reward or vindication complicates a too-simple thematic reading and pushes students toward the kind of nuanced, evidence-grounded argument that distinguishes a strong thematic essay from a more superficial one that treats the theme as a simple, uniformly reinforced moral lesson.

This complication also connects back to the novel's broader resistance to easy resolution, discussed elsewhere in a comprehensive unit's treatment of the ending, since a novel willing to show sacrifice going unrewarded is making a more complicated argument about faith and consequence than a simpler story might attempt. Encouraging students to sit with this complexity, rather than resolving it into a tidier thematic statement than the text actually supports, models the kind of intellectual honesty that strong literary analysis requires across virtually any text and any theme students encounter in their broader literary education.

Building an Essay Around the Sacrifice Theme

An essay prompt asking students to argue what the novel ultimately suggests about the relationship between sacrifice and reward, using evidence from at least two different characters' experiences, gives students a genuinely rich thematic argument to construct, grounded in the specific, varied instances of sacrifice they identified and categorized earlier in the unit. This kind of prompt naturally requires synthesis across multiple characters and multiple moments in the novel, building exactly the kind of comprehensive, evidence-integrated argumentative skill that a strong thematic essay assignment should be designed to develop and assess.

When grading these essays, it is worth specifically rewarding students who address the complicating instances of unrewarded sacrifice alongside the more straightforwardly rewarded ones, since this balance reflects a genuinely accurate and nuanced reading of how the theme actually functions across the full novel rather than a selectively simplified version of it. A rubric line addressing whether the essay engages with the theme's full complexity, rather than only its most straightforward instances, helps distinguish between essays that demonstrate genuine thematic sophistication and essays that, while competently written, ultimately oversimplify what the novel actually presents about sacrifice and its consequences.