Part IV: The Resistance

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lends itself quite well to my question. Because art = relative. The end. So on a small scale, the way Stephen judges what is pure and what is obscene is pretty much the same as my whole shtick. Pretty cool, right? Stephen spends most of his time in his head thinking about what it good and what is evil. He battles with what he is told by the church and his own independent thoughts. The conclusion it seems that he eventually comes to is that only he can decide what is right and wrong in his eyes. His spends his entire childhood being told what is and isn't a sin and he eventually ends up questioning what makes these things sins or pure acts. That is when he decides that he can't let someone else tell him what is a sin when he might think it is totally natural. Obviously if he thought murder was totally natural, it'd be a problem. Then we'd be working in some gray areas. But the point is, Joyce seems to offer up the possibility that it is the individual's responsibility to determine what is good and what is evil. Curious.

Part III: Lies for the Liars

Synge seems to take a similar stance to my own in Playboy of the Western World, in that he appears to think good and evil is relative. If at any point the townspeople believed Christy was wrong in the murder of his father, they immediately changed their minds when he justified the murder. This is where Synge and I differ. Based on Playboy of the Western World, Synge believes that an "evil" act can be manipulated and twisted and contorted into a justified and good act. With enough lying and exaggerating, a scoundrel can become a saint. Even patricide can be justified with a smooth enough tongue. The point is, lying is what makes the world go 'round. Deception makes evil good and good evil. I disagree, but it could just be because I'm a bad liar and I'm bitter about it. Still, didn't Christy's lies kind of blow up in his face? Didn't he end up actually having to try and kill his father again? But before he was found out, the townspeople worshipped him. So maybe good and evil is just a matter of deceit. Maybe the good people in the world are just the best liars. That sounds pretty cynical, doesn't it?

Part II: Dig Out Your Soul

In the end, it seems that King Lear argues that it is up to the individual person to decide whether their actions are good or evil. Lear is the one that makes the final call on whether he'd ruled justly and whether he'd treated his daughters the way he should have, just as Gloucester was the only one who could justly decide if his actions were traitorous or justified, or how Kent was the only one who could judge if his loyalty was earned. In the end, these men were the only ones who could decide if their actions where correct. It may be a small-scale version of the question of "Good vs. Evil," but the basic idea still remains: the outside world can judge a person's actions, but it is ultimately up to the individual that committed whatever act it was to decide if what they do is good or evil. At least, that is the argument that King Lear seems to make. However, there is no real answer to the question of who decides what is good and evil.

Part I: This Road Is Made of More Than Asphalt

Perhaps it's sad that I constantly wonder whether man is inherently good or evil. Perhaps it's merely evidence that this mind really is active. Either way, the conclusion I've arrived at, at least for the moment, is that we are neither.

The world is not made of people that are good, just as it is not made of people that are evil. The world is made only of people who have free will and choose to act on it. This provides a lot of gray area for us to inhabit.

Good and evil is a matter of perspective. Joe Kavalier of Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay thought the imprisonment of his family in the Holocaust was an act of pure evil. But in Hitler's eyes, it was justified. Granted, the world has judged Hitler as a mad and evil man. But this is another matter of perspective. For had Hitler succeeded in his genocide, and won the war, would history not look at him in a different light?

Oedipus viewed his actions as evil, and poked his own eyes out. The rest of us would also view his actions as evil to some degree, or at the very least very icky. But the prophet that told him he would commit such "evil" actions would not necessarily view them as evil. Instead, the prophet might just view them as fact, just an occurrence.

The point I'm trying to make is that my question cannot be answered. Which is kind of a bummer. But I'm okay with it because it leads to a much more interesting question: Who is truly just in deciding what is good and what is evil?

That's my big question. At least for now.