MORAL LIFE AS A STORY
For the past eight summers I have led Teachers Academies with secondary school teachers from all subject areas—from music to physics to history.1 During these Academies we work together for five days studying and discussing the “big stories” to which Palmer refers (1998:76).
At the end of our Academies, teachers often comment on the texts that gave them new resolve to deal more directly and, in some cases, more gracefully, with the range of challenges they face in their work or in their families. One of the books, The Things They Carried, provided the catalysts for at least one participant’s important insights. Tim O’Brien opens his Vietnam War Story by listing and categorizing what the soldiers carry with them—from love letters and dog tags, to C-rations, ammunition, and a dead man’s thumb.
After discussing O’Brien’s novel the teachers begin a parallel inquiry into the significance of what they carry and what their students carry—both externally and internally—and how it reflects in some way who they are.
This conversation prompted one teacher to relate a story about what she had been carrying for years.
She recounted a tragic accident she was involved in on a Christmas Eve over ten years ago. She and her husband were driving along in a snowstorm, when a two-year-old boy darted into the street right in front of their car. They braked immediately, but it was too late. The little boy was struck dead. His mother, who was watching from the kitchen window, rushed outside, scooped up her son, and called an ambulance. Waiting for the ambulance, she turned to the distraught couple and invited them into her home. Every Christmas since the tragedy, this mother invites the couple to her son’s memorial service.
Still deeply troubled and unable to discuss the tragedy, the woman driving the car had never related the circumstances of the event to anyone.
She chose to tell this incident at the end of the Academy because it was something she had been “carrying” like a lead weight in her haversack. zv45 Up until that moment she had been the victim, carrying a tremendous burden. She was now able to see and relish the enormous debt of gratitude she owed the mother of this little boy.
This woman was not ready to disclose the tragedy life had dealt her up until this point.
It was in our exploration of literature and specifically our discussion of Tim O’Brien’s story, that she was finally able to shed this enormous burden. Up until this point she had seen herself as a victim and taken this woman’s forgiveness for granted. After reflecting on her experience again in light of our discussion, she developed the moral fuel and courage she needed to face reality squarely. This teacher’s experience once again
underscores the unique power of literature to offer moral insight and even catalyze a significant change in a person’s life.
While philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists provide us with theories about the moral life, narratives provide us with concrete illustrations and vicarious experiences of moral growth and development, as well as moral decline. Narrative provides the best context for examining desire and moral philosophy helps to explain how narrative really does serve as a roadmap.2
Alasdair MacIntyre, author of the groundbreaking treatise on moral philosophy, After Virtue, argues that the moral life is essentially like a story, a drama unfolding toward a particular vision or telos. And each person’s desires are ultimately guided and propelled by some “conceptions of a possible shared future, a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and others repel us, some seem already foreclosed and others perhaps inevitable” (215).
The parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, helps to shape one such conception for the fifteen-year-old student who tells her life-changing story in the essay excerpted below. A semifinalist in a “Laws of Life,” international essay competition sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, this student writes about her volunteer experience in a hospital nursery during her stay in Peru one summer. When she realized that some infants were without parents, she made additional late night trips to the nursery.
I remember walking towards the nursery one night. I could see, in the hallway, one crib, alone and ostracized from the others. I approached the crib, and inside, there lay a baby, crying helplessly, obviously in need of love and comfort. She was slightly bigger than my forearm and her strangely developed face suggested pre-maturity. “She was born three months early and her mother hasn’t come back for her,” I was told. I witnessed nurses scurrying around, inside the nursery, feeding and changing the babies of mothers who care, but ignoring the tiny person struggling for attention from inside the crib. “They have to take care of the others first, then, if there is time, she will be fed,” someone explained to me. I could not imagine standing by watching as zv46 this perfect little creature, unable to move her head, struggled to find a comfortable position and, at times, desperately gasped for a breath due to her underdeveloped respiratory system. I immediately lifted her into my arms and held her close. The improvement within those few seconds seemed miraculous, almost unbelievable. The baby stopped crying. Her hands remained in tightly clenched fists, but I could tell she was relieved. From that moment on, I knew what I had to do. It was my chance to be the person I never thought I could be, the Good Samaritan. Every night, times varying after midnight, I found my way through the laboring mothers to that baby in the hallway. I spent hours just rocking her and at times, even singing to her. I began to notice gradual improvements. She seemed to let go of all her worries and anxieties the moment I picked her up each night. By the end of my stay, even her tight, frustrated fists would spread open into wide, reaching hands.
The Good Samaritan represents one of those individuals in our collective imagination
who inspires our response to the question, “How should I live?” As the four factors in the schooling of desire—relationships, pleasure and pain, reflection, and courage—have enormous resonance with our students’ own experience, so does the structure of narratives. The “image of some future…telos” that MacIntyre speaks of is precisely what moves or fails to move a person to choose certain paths or forego others, as our four protagonists show us. Similarly, we are protagonists in our own life narrative. As MacIntyre explains,
Unpredictability and teleology…coexist as part of our lives; like characters in a fictional narrative we do not know what will happen next, but nonetheless our lives have a certain form which projects itself towards our future. (216)
Teaching novels is an inescapable part of our work with students; why not take advantage of this intersection between literature and life to help students become more adept at ethical reflection? Inherent to narrative are questions related to the nature of moral choices and commitments. MacIntyre’s “central thesis” is that, through one’s history and experiences, a person becomes “a teller of stories that aspire to truth.” These stories are not, as Macbeth proclaims in despair, “a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.” Rather, he argues, “the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ if I can answer the question ‘of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (216).3In other words, our own life journey requires a search for narrative meaning. We all seek to discover the history and telos that gives us a sense of origin as well as a sense of purpose and direction to our lives. Reading zv47 narrative literature provides an important point of comparison and entry into the stories of others.
By witnessing their journey, we learn to appreciate the narrative quality of all human life.
By attending to each protagonist’s evolving telos, we learn to question the North Star guiding our own lives. In his book, Moral Imagination, Mark Johnson draws the following analogy and offers an apt illustration of MacIntyre’s point:
Every one of us is actively plotting our lives, both consciously and unconsciously, by attempting to construct ourselves as significant characters within what we regard as meaningful life stories. (1993:165)
Narrative can illuminate purposes, plans, and goals, which are the forms by which our lives have some direction, motivation, and significance for us. (171, emphasis added)
As English teachers, we have the opportunity to help students to trace and ponder the
“direction, motivation, and significance” of literary characters’ choices, and hopefully to become more capable of evaluating the significance of their own choices. In his book, Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor (1989) highlights the importance of narrative to our sense of identity and purpose.4
We know where we are through a mixture of recognition of landmarks before us and a sense of how we have traveled to get here…. Thus making sense of my present action…requires a narrative understanding of my life, a sense of what I have become which can only be given in a story. And as I project my life
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forward and endorse the existing direction or give it a new one, I project a future story, not just a state of the momentary future but a bent for my whole life to come. (48)
Adolescents, in the midst of constructing meaningful life stories for their own lives, are well disposed to identifying such “landmarks” in literary characters’ lives and exploring the factors that help each protagonist attain them. By asking them to attend to each character’s evolving telos they learn to detect the “bent for [his or her] whole life to come” (48).
What these authors suggest is that we can only understand a person’s life if we have some context for making sense of the question, “Where is this person headed and why?”
This is precisely the question at the heart of growing up, perhaps even at the heart of discovering what it really means to be human. As Martha Nussbaum writes, the central Aristotelian question “how should one live?” is implicit in literary narratives and reminds readers interested in an ethical reflection to ask, “What sorts of human beings are presenting themselves to us?” (1990:26, 32). Keeping these questions before us helps us to make sense both of literature and of life.
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Fostering ethical reflection in the English classroom, then, raises many complex questions. How do teachers pursue literature as character building without reducing it to a cheap and easy list of moral lessons? How can they engage students in moral reflection that does not descend to a highly subjective reader-response approach to literature or a therapy session in the classroom? How can students and teachers map out the moral vector of a literary character’s life? What constitutes a morally pivotal point in a character’s life? What factors contribute to bringing such points about? In short, how can the teacher and reader explore moral motivation—that is, how a character’s moral agency is informed by circumstances, relationships, choices, and personal dispositions? To address these questions I offer a pedagogical framework that fosters both rigorous textual analysis and ethical reflection.
Characters in literature provide us with a window to the soul through which we can examine the internal and external factors involved in becoming or failing to become the kind of person we admire or respect. Thus, a writer of fiction can provide us with insights about fictional characters’ choices and commitments—their consistency or idiosyncrasies, their merits and limitations. As English teachers we can help students become more adept at evaluating the choices that individuals make in the context of other genres: short story, biography, autobiography, and memoir, for example. More importantly, we also teach them to become more critical consumers of the various media images and messages they receive daily. By teaching students to see beyond the superficial, to notice and take stock of all that informs characters’ choices and commitments—how they deal with relationships, pleasure and pain, and how they reflect upon and face the various challenges that they meet—we help to refine their powers of discrimination and judgment. By prompting students to pay attention to how fictional characters respond to the truth, we help them to acquire greater respect for integrity, contempt for hypocrisy, and sensitivity to what accounts for moral growth or moral decline.
MAPPING MORALLY PIVOTAL POINTS
Each character’s moral trajectory is dramatically mapped out by highlighting aspirational ideals or tele—what it is that a character desires at a given point in his or her life and why.5 These tele are brought into sharp relief at morally pivotal points. By asking students to pay attention to how these morally pivotal points are brought about, they can begin to track the factors that help or hinder moral growth over time. The case studies that follow in Part II, then, are designed to focus students’ attention on identifying and evaluating
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a the evolving aspirations (tele) of the characters;
b the internal and external factors that help to shape or inform these tele; and c the changes in moral dispositions required to achieve them.
Morally pivotal points are transformational episodes, events, experiences, or encounters that compel individuals to reassess or refine their life goal (s) or path (s). In one of his recent “On Language” columns in The New York Times Magazine, master wordsmith William Safire defines a “pivot” as “an axis on which something turns,” explaining that pivotal is “a good word to suggest decision-making power” (2003:12). This emphasis on decisionmaking captures precisely the sense in which I am using the term. Unlike a significant advance in one’s career (such as Carton’s success in the Old Bailey courthouse), or an epiphany (like Elizabeth’s realization that her father has been remiss in carrying out his family duties), an event, experience, or encounter is morally pivotal only if it inspires commitment to or aversion from a particular goal or path. At each morally pivotal point, the protagonists acquire a new or refined vision of what John Dewey calls their “ends in view” (1933:125), and this refined vision of their telos gives new direction to their choices and actions.
In Dante’s Purgatorio, the second book of his Divine Comedy, the pilgrim souls learn to progress toward heaven through what Dante the poet repeatedly refers to as a
“conversio” a turning around or pivoting, which gives them an ability to see more clearly where they are headed and why. Each conversio on their journey through Purgatory gives them new momentum and purpose despite the pains of purification they must endure.
Similarly, morally pivotal points signal moments when the protagonist has acquired a more focused vision of his or her goal.
To help map out the moral trajectory of the protagonists in these four novels, I have placed morally pivotal points and challenge points in sharp relief. To facilitate comparisons and contrasts among them, I consistently focus on three dramatic moments:
two morally pivotal points and one challenge point within each character case study.
Mapping morally pivotal points and challenge points provides a useful framework for character analysis but not an archetype for all ethical reflection on literature. Novels with unconventional narrative structure, such as stream of consciousness, for example, may not be suited for this kind of character mapping at all. Character studies undertaken with other novels may yield several morally pivotal points. Others, because of the slow, gradual nature of moral change, may illustrate few to none. Dostoevsky’s Crime and
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Punishment and Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illych, for example, reveal a gradual process of moral growth that culminates in a dramatic moral revelation for each of the protagonists.
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Through my analysis of the novels, I have found that as each character’s schooling evolves from one morally pivotal point to the next, a pattern of moral progress (or regression) emerges. In broad terms, moral progress evoked by the schooling of desire can be described as a gradual movement from a lower, less rational state where a character is dominated or blinded by competing or misguided desires, to a nobler, more compelling and co-ordinated action-guiding desire for a worthy telos. Elizabeth Bennet initially trusts her own judgment but is blind to her prejudice; Sydney Carton has a deep knowledge of virtue but lacks the will to live it; Janie Crawford is morally good from the outset, but lacks mature understanding to choose well. The schooling of desire illustrates the integration of character and competence in each of these cases.
The successful schooling of desire follows a similar pattern and involves certain internal and external factors (relationships, pleasure and pain, reflection and courage), while failed schooling follows from the absence of these factors. A general framework emerges, therefore, for studying moral development not only in these four cases, but also in other works of literature and in real life.
A FRAMEWORK FOR MORAL ANALYSIS
Each character begins with his or her own moral starting points: a set of personal dispositions and habits. A change is signaled at the first morally pivotal point, which marks the beginning of the schooling of desire. Some experience of dissonance awakens the characters and prompts them to assess their telos, to ask themselves, “Where am I headed and why?” They are challenged to see things differently. Their vision of what is worthwhile is called into question, or confronted—even if incompletely. This morally pivotal point is perhaps best characterized as a shake-up, a moment of realization; they see something differently for the first time—Elizabeth realizes she has misread Charlotte’s views on marriage and Darcy’s overtures; Carton sees in Darnay everything he could have been and admires; Janie realizes that her ideal of love cannot be found in just any marriage—but they are not yet able to commit themselves to pursuing their refined aspirations.
The second morally pivotal point gives rise to both a leap in self-knowledge and a heightened desire to pursue a revised telos. The protagonists achieve greater clarity of understanding; their mind and heart are more sharply aligned. Armed with a clearer conception of what will genuinely contribute to their happiness, the characters have the opportunity to act with greater integrity, embracing these newly “seen” ends and following the trajectory of intelligent self-direction. While the first morally pivotal point helps to raise questions about the worthiness of their telos, zv51 the second helps them to re-channel their desires energetically toward a refined telos.
The third point is a challenge point more than a pivotal point. The character’s “turn” of moral direction is challenged. The challenge point dramatically signals the need for the protagonist to make a deliberate choice in the face of conflict. The character does not pivot, does not change his or her telos. Nevertheless, that telos is challenged and the
character is required to make a choice that will influence his or her life as a whole, setting the course for subsequent flourishing or degradation. The challenge point indicates the nature of virtues as “modes of choice,” those habits and dispositions that enable a person to choose well.6 At the challenge point, those protagonists whose desires have been correctly schooled are able to choose the best means to reach their goal. And those whose desires are incorrectly schooled, such as Gatsby, blindly pursue a path to self-destruction.
The morally pivotal points and challenge point for Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities are laid out in the table below. Appendix C provides reproducible blank tables that students can complete with examples from the text as they read.
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Sydney Carton The schooling of desire leads to a character’s refined understanding and pursuit of an ideal that is both
worthwhile and compelling Mapping
pivotal points
Definition Example/illustration Telos/object of desire Moral
starting points Habits, dispositions, and context
What we know about the character’s habitual behavior, attitudes, dispositions as well as initial aspirations and goals (tele).
Indefferent, slovenly, drunkard, savvy, competent lawyer
“careless and slovenly if not debauched”; “almost insolent”.
To remain an effective lawyer but to also remain committed to anesthetize his misery with alcohol.
1st morally pivotal point
Shake-up, realization that character is not pursuing the best possible telos.
Carton meets with Darnay. Ashamed, self-hate, envious of unable to put it into practice.
Darnay, desirous of virtue but unable to put it into practice.
To surround himself with individuals he admires.
2nd morally pivotal point
Leap in self knowledge, clearer
perspective on a worthy path.
Cartoon chooses to disclose his unhappiness to Lucie and offer his gratitude for her
friendship with a promise.
To offer himself in friendship and service.
Challenge point
Meets a challenge that imposes stress or pressure;
telos becomes clear but it is difficult to pursue. The character chooses
Carton chooses to go to Paris and save Darnay despite the risk to his own life. He employs all of his intelligence, skill, and virtue to complete his mission.
To fulfill his promise of friendship- and to be the kind of person he always aspired to be but always felt unable to Teaching character education through literature 44