Patterns of Manhood

Hamlet has long been interpreted as a figure who is too paralyzed by moral self-consciousness to act in the way he feels it is his duty to act.  One way of understanding the root of that paralysis is by examining the character of Fortinbras, the warrior-prince, who in his resolute pursuit of military glory, stands in evident contrast with Hamlet's own indecisiveness.  The play makes us consider whether the moral bewilderment that is such a common affliction of modern man is in fact the result of his typical displacement from the battlefield, and the kind of indubitable duties to be found there.

Crane's famous novel of the Civil War captures one of the paradoxes at the heart of the warrior's experience.  The brute violence of the battlefield seems to reduce men to so many amoral objects, a process memorably described by Simone Weil in her reading of the Iliad.  Yet through their endurance of that violence, men often emerge from the experience of war morally transformed.  The battlefield then becomes the place where man's dignity is, at one and the same time, supremely degraded and supremely exalted.

Faulkner's famous story explores the paradox of a young man growing up in the "doomed wilderness," bred to virtues that modern life seems to render superfluous.  Yet in the "talk" of the hunt, the enduring story of the men who pursued the legendary bear year after year, Faulkner calls our attention to one of the ways those virtues might be preserved for our times.

Olenin, the hero of Tolstoy's novella "The Cossacks," is a young man who has convinced himself he is more virtuous than he really is.  He presents us with a model for all those ardent yet fundamentally flippant young men, who are deluded by their own romantic rhetoric into overestimating the tenor of their character.