Because of Emma's prolific entries, I must perforce respond with my own. Here, I compare and contrast White Teeth, The
White Tiger, Storm and Steel and my trusty Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, along with the newly entered, The Odradek, by Kafka. Ok here's the deal. White Teeth deals with the post-war lives of two very boring compatriots, Damad Iqbal and Archie Jones.
A long kept secret between the two unwitting "brothers" yields a denouement which turns one protagonist into a hero, who for all his life was at the bottom of the heap, the end of his rope and nothing more than a cipher in the immensity of the universe. Actually less than a cypher.
The White Tiger concerns a man who sacrifices his moral code for the embrace of another. Dealing with the dichotomy of the choices he makes, in modern India, is a difficult task for the reader and one which delves into the dilemma within which modern man finds himself.
That is, what is essence, and does it require an interior moral code to make that essence viable. Plato and the Playtpus... provides us some insight in another joke: "A man wins $100,000 in Las Vegas and, not wanting anyone to know about it, he takes it home and buries it in his backyard. The next morning he goes out back and finds only an empty hole. He sees footprints leading to the house next door, which belongs to a deaf-mute, so he asks the professor down the street, who knows sign language, to help him confront his neighbor. The man takes his pistol, and he and the professor knock on the neighbor's door. When the neighbor answers, the man waves the pistol at him and says to the professor, 'You tell this guy that if he doesn't give me back my $100,000, I'm going to kill him right now!'
The professor conveys the message to the neighbor, who responds that he hid the money in his own backyard under the cherry tree. The professor turns to the man and says, 'He refuses to tell you. He says he'd rather die first.'
In The Odradek Kafka creates an artificial world and populates it with an annoying creature. The moral dilemma faced is born of angst. Will the creature outlive the protagonist, and if so, what is the point? The Odradek seems to have no purpose in this life (no essence), while Kafka's protagonist faces all the cares of any moral man, the albatrosses of modern life; work, family and cares. It's just not fair.
Another joke: A seeker has heard that the wisest guru in all of India, lives atop India's highest mountain. So the seeker treks all over hill and Delhi until he reaches the fabled mountain. It's incredibly steep, and more than once he slips and falls. By the time he reaches the top, he is full of cuts and bruises, but there is the guru.
"Oh wise guru", the seeker says, "I have come to you to ask what the secret of life is."
"Ah, yes, the secret of life," the guru says. "The secret of life is a teacup."
"A teacup? I came all the way up here to find the meaning of life, and you tell me it is a teacup!"
The guru shrugs. "So maybe it isn't a teacup."
The last work, in this tortured bit of logic (blog entry) is Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, arguably the best book ever written about war, at least WWI. Here, the soldier portrayed has simply set aside his moral code for one which suits his context. He is a good man, who enjoys tremendously the culture of war, but at the same time, admires his enemy and provides him solace when he is confronted with pain. This does not preclude him from killing that man, if the context changes.
So in conclusion, things are not as they seem, moral codes can change on the toss of a dime, Machiavellian ethics is conditional and war (of some kind) is the crucible within which all of these concepts are stirred together, boding either well or not with regard to civilization and our continued existence. Lastly, none of it really means a damn thing anyway.
