LITERARY ANALYSIS PAPER

A Partial Fulfillment in GE11

SISON, Stephanie Loren C., Permit #409

November 2018
 Tired Dr. Lazaro

By Stephanie Loren C. Sison

The short story Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro of Gregorio Brillantes provides us the connection
between all the elements mentioned in the title. It is a piece that imparts how life can change a person and his
perspectives, for better or for worse. Dr. Lazaro is a man who started questioning faith after all the time he has
seen love fade away.

In the beginning of the story, Dr. Lazaro was peaceful and relaxed, laying in the veranda under the view
of a starry night, listening to Chopin in the phonograph, and nothing else touching his resting mind. Until, came
a phone call taking away the calmness as duty takes over his tranquil moment. After all, “everyone had a claim
on his time”. Everyone except for him. He is restless and he responds to whichever call it is as he dedicated his
life in this field. On the other line was Pedro Esteban, asking if he is kind enough to check on his child. Tetanus.
The doctor knew it was fatal and helpless yet still answered yes. He’s coming. Because that’s what he do, “he
had committed himself to that answer, long ago; duty had taken the place of an exhausted compassion.”
Answering to the job as if he had no other choice, for he traded his time to the line of his profession even with
passion long gone, only the sense of responsibility remained.

Dr. Lazaro, after a long time of doing what he does, and observed countless despair and demise, had his
belief in God shaken. If He truly exists and loves the world, then why must He let the world suffer? What kind
of God would allow pain? What kind of Father would let his child bear the pain? Where has the love gone?
“The sparrow does not fall, he mused at the sky, but it falls just the same. But to what end are the sufferings of
the child?” Now, the doctor’s wife and son being Godly does not at all bother him. When they go to mass on
Sundays, when the plaster of saints in glass cases are hanging on their walls, and even when he passes through
the Sacred Heart whenever he goes down the stairs, they don’t disturb him at all. In what he does, he tends
people’s wounds and tries saving them from the grip of death, he started questioning how can God even endure
the pain on earth? He has also lost his faith because he has been a witness to countless, seemingly random
deaths: There is a patient with cancer, whose racking pain even morphine can’t assuage anymore; there is the
baby who is now dying from tetanus; but most of all, there was his eldest son who, we later learn, committed
suicide. “There’s disease, suffering, because Adam ate the apple,” even putting the blame on Adam. Because
who is there really to blame?

The doctor was surrounded by light but he embraced the darkness inside him, he let it envelope his
whole being. His wife, whose loyalty to their religion never falters, his son who aspires to become a disciple of
God, even baptized the baby after doing the best he can to revive it, they were the light. He had himself roaming
around a dim and cold cave, never seeing the light outside. Even when with Ben’s warmth and intimate bond
with the greater being which he used to believe in, too. He even sees a fragment of himself from his younger
years, when he was like that, full energy, very optimistic. But now he chose to believe that “the boy had
presence of mind, convictions, but what else? The world will teach him his greatest lessons”. The darkness
though does not make Lazaro an evil man. He is simply tired, a character who has seen too much.

After all the walking and wandering around the cave, Dr. Lazaro has finally seen light again. He even
thought to himself that night, “he felt closer to the boy than he had ever been in years” and that his mother
would be proud to hear of what he did that night. But just when he was nearing the exit to the cave and steps
closer to enter the world of lightness, he is consigned back to his place of dullness, death and dirt. “As he slid
the door open on the vault of darkness, the familiar depths of the house, it came to Dr. Lazaro faintly in the late
night that for certain things, like love, there was only so much time. But the glimmer was lost instantly, buried
in the mist of indifference and sleep rising now in his brain". He’s gotten used to the shadows that when he’s
finally reached the brightness that he craves for, he found it blinding and quickly retrieved back.

It is sorrowful, that given the chance to have regain his faith, to see finally the light, Dr. Lazaro, quickly
turned away, strangely comfortable in the sad, wallowing darkness of disbelief.