Philosophy in Fiction

My junior year of high school, I took an elective English class entitled Philosophy in Literature. We thirty teenagers and one brilliant, grandfatherly teacher crowded into that classroom to sift our way from Bishop Berkeley to Plato’s Cave, Bertrand Russell to Kierkegaard to Kant’s Categorical Imperative. All of these thinkers were brand new to me, and wading through their dense treatises, the ideas piled up in me as a new treasure trove of ways to think about the world.

In a one-semester course, we hurried our way through free will and determinism, idealism and materialism, through Plato’s Symposium and the question of God. Each unit culminated in a piece of literature, within which we traced the concepts we had studied. For free will, it was the film Run Lola Run, and our existential meanderings left us Waiting for Godot. Short stories and a smattering of poetry met us here and there. Thinking back, it feels like we scaled a mountain of Western thought.

Literature can be the perfect window into philosophical ideas. Novels and plays can dramatize a concept, put it into action visibly in the characters’ world, or the search for philosophical truth can form the story’s journey. Fiction that engages with philosophical issues can take on a deeper significance for us, because its ideas are relevant to life and the world in profound ways. The story becomes a springboard for our own thought. Books that “make us think” have a foot in these deep questions that keep humanity pondering.

I am reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. It is an exploration of political and economic systems, so far what seem to be portrayals of communist-anarchist and capitalist societies on two neighboring planets. The citizens of Annares, who scrape their communal existence from a harsh soil, are descendants of a group of ideological dissenters who left Urras, a non-egalitarian capitalist society generations ago. Now, after minimal contact, the Annaresti physicist Shevek travels to Urras.

The two societies, so different in their core organizations, play out different political and ethical philosophies for we readers to explore. And the story is interspersed too with conversations between characters discussing these core issues. Yes, it is the story of Shevek’s adventure, but it is also a sustained look at core philosophical questions. I’m still in the first chapters of The Dispossessed, but it has already captivated my attention, as did Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness that so imaginatively and profoundly explored gender when I read it a year ago.

As writers, if we choose to engage philosophically in our stories, how can we do so most successfully? Here are a few ideas that can help.

Consider audience and genre

For some readers, explicit exploration of a philosophical question in a story will be engaging. Consider who your primary audience might be, and a philosophical element to the book might be just what it needs to amp up its intellectual standing in that group’s eyes.

On the other hand, other books might suffer from an injection of philosophical discussion. Readers who are seeking light entertainment may be turned off when things grow too serious. It’s a misconception that academic literature is boring; rather, it matters the audience the context. Bestselling page-turners go over perfectly with some audiences but don’t move others.

As with other elements of a story, it’s best to be upfront about a story’s philosophical content. A story that begins packed with action, conflict-heavy, sets up readers’ expectations for what is coming next. When three chapters in the novel drops into a slower, introspective style, readers who enjoyed the action may lose interest. A story that shows what it is trying to be early on has a better chance of engaging the readers who will appreciate the book in its entirety.

Connections to the story, significance for characters

To what extent are the philosophical issues in the story integral to its plot and characters? A rich integration, in which the philosophical questions hinge on major events in the narrative, will capitalize on fiction’s ability to transform ideas into something alive. Build a plot around the philosophy, or choose philosophical questions by what naturally emerges from the story, and the two will resonate with one another like a chord. What questions do you have about the world? How are these playing out in the story beneath your fingers?

In addition to the integrity of the plot, a character’s arc that is meaningfully connected to the philosophical questions of the text becomes palpable. I think of Camus’s The Stranger, in which how readers judge the protagonist Mersault is tied intimately to how we view the absurd and what significance we see in human life.

Are you providing an answer?

Does the story take a side on the questions, or are the philosophical issues raised impartially, for the reader to inspect? Even if we intend to leave things open, it is worth noting that it is incredibly difficult and perhaps not desirable to remain impartial. The implicit value judgements that arise in fiction, based on word choice, a character’s likability or lack thereof, and space allotted on the page, all of these can betray our personal perspectives.

I tend to shy away from didactic philosophical argument in a piece of fiction, but I also want to hear the author’s perspective. In my own writing, I am endeavoring to strike a middle ground, to raise the questions and let my voice come through too, but not to hammer the issues on the head. After all, I am only one perspective, and the reader has their own.

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What do you think of fiction’s engagement with philosophy? Do you have particular stories that stand out as strong in this regard? How do you approach philosophical quandaries in your own writing?

The beautiful snow of the last weeks has unfortunately turned to slush. Today we are due for sleet. I’m hoping for a cold snap soon.

Best wishes for the coming week, and thanks for stopping by,
Jimmy