john parry a father who would leave his at most 1 year old son and possibly postpartum wife for an arctic expedition, despite knowing his family were cold and distant (were they before he went missing on this expedition? well. to not see their son's only child for years..). gets lost, tries to find his way back to them initially, but then resigns himself to building a life in lyra's world and having a purpose that he believes justifies his loss of the family he loves, a republic in the way lyra and will have to do so. becomes a man so entrenched in that purpose, that he will break a promise to a man that died for him in order that it is fulfilled, that he will tell a young scared bleeding boy to serve this purpose as well. "A child… How could they let it happen? Well, so it must be" (because it has to be worth it. it has to be worth not trying to go back to his wife and son. he has to see this through) "Ignore everything else, no matter how important it seems, and go and do this" he has a similar belief to asriel that the end justifies the means, but even more so that the personal cost & loss pales in significance to the greater good and he has weighed them up, calculated the fallout, and made that decision, yoked himself to his decision forever to his deathbed. and it will kill him slowly (literally physically and mentally) to live in a different world. would he have gone back if he knew exactly how his family had been impacted in the aftermath of him going missing? we won't know. but we know that he knew in the last moments before he died that this was his son and he would send him to asriel, a boy with a knife, his identity reduced to a weapon, just as john parry had reduced his own identity to a singular purpose. john parry went missing in that arctic blizzard and stanislaus grumman/jopari/the shaman was his new task till death ("Why didn't you stop the witch, then? Why did you let her kill him?" "We would have done, earlier. But his task was over once he'd led us to you.")
