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Dear everyone:
The reason that "The Ones Who Walk Away from the West and the Sea" (a.) is a story rather than an essay, (b.) uses no proper names, (c.) gets certain salient details "wrong" is that it does not actually represent my ideas/opinions/wishes about the end of The Lord of the Rings.
It is an intertextual meditation between The Lord of the Rings and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." It takes issue with certain of the beliefs and ideas that led to the ending of The Lord of the Rings, specifically the refusal of partial recovery. In Tolkien, you either recover, or you don't. There's no struggle to negotiate the world with diminished capacity, to recuperate after a shattering tragedy. To live with what you have become.
This is a function of the kind of story Tolkien chose to tell as much as it is a function of his own beliefs (and I am not pretending that those beliefs can be deduced from his fiction). Epic heroes (in the literary sense of "epic," Beowulf, The Iliad, etc.) do not survive battles to live crippled or maimed. They die on the battle-field or they survive in triumph. Tolkien adulterates and ameliorates that epic sensibility by filtering it through his hobbit protagonists, but Frodo's fate is as much an acknowledgment of the destructiveness of epic as it is an acknowledgment of the destructiveness of evil.
No, I don't think going into the West is a "reward" or a question of "deserving." That's much too simple a reading.
What I do believe is that Tolkien's chosen ending allows him--and that's "him" the author rather than "him" the protagonist--to circumvent and elide the reality of thousands of men of his generation, the men who are the secondary characters, for example, of Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, men who actually have to live with the unredeemable pain and sometimes humiliation of having survived World War I. They are diminished, but they don't have the choice to go into the West. And what my protagonist is saying is that he, and his author behind him, shouldn't have that choice either. Not because it's a reward, or because he does or doesn't deserve it, but because of those thousands of men who maybe deserve it and maybe don't, but will NEVER GET TO CHOOSE. Their choices are between surviving--hurting, depressed, alienated--and suicide. They aren't given an opt-out clause.
I don't have an epic sensibility. I believe in partial recovery, and I believe that is damn well better than the alternatives (in, obviously, a situation where full recovery is not possible).
This is a philosophical argument with The Lord of the Rings as a whole, not with the ending. And "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is in there too because it understands that "deserving" is not the point. Is never the point.
Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?
The reason that "The Ones Who Walk Away from the West and the Sea" (a.) is a story rather than an essay, (b.) uses no proper names, (c.) gets certain salient details "wrong" is that it does not actually represent my ideas/opinions/wishes about the end of The Lord of the Rings.
It is an intertextual meditation between The Lord of the Rings and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." It takes issue with certain of the beliefs and ideas that led to the ending of The Lord of the Rings, specifically the refusal of partial recovery. In Tolkien, you either recover, or you don't. There's no struggle to negotiate the world with diminished capacity, to recuperate after a shattering tragedy. To live with what you have become.
This is a function of the kind of story Tolkien chose to tell as much as it is a function of his own beliefs (and I am not pretending that those beliefs can be deduced from his fiction). Epic heroes (in the literary sense of "epic," Beowulf, The Iliad, etc.) do not survive battles to live crippled or maimed. They die on the battle-field or they survive in triumph. Tolkien adulterates and ameliorates that epic sensibility by filtering it through his hobbit protagonists, but Frodo's fate is as much an acknowledgment of the destructiveness of epic as it is an acknowledgment of the destructiveness of evil.
No, I don't think going into the West is a "reward" or a question of "deserving." That's much too simple a reading.
What I do believe is that Tolkien's chosen ending allows him--and that's "him" the author rather than "him" the protagonist--to circumvent and elide the reality of thousands of men of his generation, the men who are the secondary characters, for example, of Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, men who actually have to live with the unredeemable pain and sometimes humiliation of having survived World War I. They are diminished, but they don't have the choice to go into the West. And what my protagonist is saying is that he, and his author behind him, shouldn't have that choice either. Not because it's a reward, or because he does or doesn't deserve it, but because of those thousands of men who maybe deserve it and maybe don't, but will NEVER GET TO CHOOSE. Their choices are between surviving--hurting, depressed, alienated--and suicide. They aren't given an opt-out clause.
I don't have an epic sensibility. I believe in partial recovery, and I believe that is damn well better than the alternatives (in, obviously, a situation where full recovery is not possible).
This is a philosophical argument with The Lord of the Rings as a whole, not with the ending. And "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is in there too because it understands that "deserving" is not the point. Is never the point.
Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?
