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Moral Codes in Literature

In committed literature of the first half of the twentieth century the individual is guided by a moral code that is made rather than one that is received. Characters in novels by AndrT Malraux and in plays by Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre are inevitably placed in extreme situations where recourse to received notions of morality is at least impractical, and often impossible. It is impossible, of course, if the characters are to achieve freedom, as the men and women in these works attempt to do. For some characters the circumstances produce a retreat to the received codes, but these instances function as demonstrations of the futility of received notions of morality. The Grand Duchess in Camus' The Just Assassins (1949), for example, is overwhelmed by the world and retreats into faith. But her faith is shown to be a form of complicity with the order the terrorists have identified as the source of the oppression against which they have staked their lives. In his confrontation with the Duchess, Kaliayev recognizes this complicity for what it is and is strengthened in his commitment to the code he had worked out in the course of the play. But this code, like those of the other characters in the literature, is not presented as an absolute set of principles. Rather the moral responses are a kind of ethical pragmatism--but one that makes great demands of them. Just as the terrorists Dora Dulebov and Ivan Kaliayev, for example, know that death is the only possible end for their chosen course, so nearly all these makers of moral codes recognize that their choices may mean liberty but that it has severe consequences. In taking on freedom they assume responsibility for the acts they commit. They are, in Sartre's famous formulation, 'condemned to be free.'

This essay features a discussion of the making of moral codes in two novels by Malraux, The Conquerors (1928) and Man's Hope [L'Espoir] (1938), two plays by Camus, The Just As...

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Moral Codes in Literature. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:35, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1695388.html