Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Also in chapter 19 is a discussion about whether giving (self-sacrifice) is truly good/noble if the gift is only made in the expectation of some later return (as being offered by the church "a thousandfold"). Though this is couched in religious terms in the book, it is a more general philosophical question.
Selfishness and selflessness seems to be a theme overlaying both the contemporary and the Outland settings of the work. There is, by the end of the first book, no sign that selflessness is particularly rewarding, but then that would be consistent with the idea expressed ch19: it wouldn't be selfless if it was rewarding.
|
There's a version of Christianity in the US that says that God rewards prayers with material prosperity. On the one hand, that seems an extreme example of what Carroll deplores, doing good in the expectation of reward. At the same time, he's careful to put no limitations on God or the efficacy of prayer. However, people of religious bent have to be comfortable with paradox and Carroll is manifestly even more so than most. I thought him unnecessarily hard on Eric, who lives an upright life and even saves Bruno, where the believers were impotent. Clearly Carroll was no fan of secular humanism.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
There is, for me, no sense that Carroll did not know what he was doing, and by the time we get to chapter 22 we have the narrator with a watch that alters time, and find him saying "I valued my own reputation for sanity too highly to venture on explaining to him what happened". This begins to put a real-world perspective over what, up to now, might otherwise be explained away as dreams or hallucinations ... and we still might, but these explanations demonstrate that Carroll is quite conscious of the effect he has created.
|
I thought that Carroll signaled that at the very beginning, when the Lord Chancellor seemed to address Mister Sir directly, although Mister Sir immediately became incorporeal subsequently. Or, one thought that was with me, why not assume that others were shifting between worlds as well, so anyone's seemingly irrelevant remark might be addressed to yet another world equally real or unreal. Once you have more than one universe, there's no reason not to infer multitudes.