Character Development

         
            For Mack, his look on things changed dramatically throughout the book. In the beginning he was very depressed and going through the time called the "Great Sadness". He was depressed about how on a family vacation his daughter got abducted and he has not seen her since. He started to become further and further away from his wife, other kids, and friends as he slipped into a deeper depression. She is presumably dead as they believe she got murdered.
           
             Mack has changed because since he was depressed in the beginning, the life changing experience when he gets the letter and goes to the shack, helps him see his life and the situation about his daughter differently. When he gets to the shack he meets several different characters that represent his religious beliefs. The most important being Papa, the one who wrote the letter that Mack got in the mail on that freezing, icy-cold day. "I had a little tussle with the driveway when i got the mail, but other than that, everything is fine" (Young 21). Papa is the physical representation of Jesus

            
After spending an immense amount of time at the shack with all of these spiritual characters, he begins to realize that some things just happen in life. Some of them you can control and others just happen without explanation or reason, they just do. For example his daughter being abducted. Being with these with these physical representations of spiritual beliefs helped him realize that you can't always help it, so he begins to forgive. He forgives his daughters attacker and everything that has happened.
      "Mack settled back into his chair surveying the view from the porch. 'I feel so full!'"
     "'Well, you've eaten most of the scones.'"
     "'Thats not what I mean,'" he laughed, "'and you know it. The world just looks a thousand times brighter and I fell a thousand times lighter.'"
       This is when Mack is sitting on the front porch of the cabin with Jesus talking about why everything had happened to his daughter like it did. He says that he feels lighter as a metaphor to represent him understanding all of this now. He has come to accept what has happened and to live with it.