Fourteen weeks after the beginning of the project, Morrie dies, leaving to
the world the example of his courage and positive attitude toward life and
death.
Evaluation
The major conflict of the book occurs when Morrie is led to accept
his impending death from ALS and is visited each Tuesday by his former
student, Mitch, who has become disillusioned by the popular culture. Thus
the acceptance of death, the need of others, and the rejection of popular
culture are likely to be the three main themes giving a moral sense to the
story. In the first theme, Morrie consciously “detaches himself from the
experience” when he suffers his violent coughs that threat him with the
possibility of death. Morrie derives his method of detachment from the
Buddhist philosophy that one should not alienate oneself with material
possession since everything that exists is impermanent. In detaching, one
is able to step out of the material world and gain consciousness for the
sake of broader perspective and better self-control in stressful situations.
Morrie does not intend to stop feeling or experiencing in his detachment,
but wants to experience wholly. It is only through that way that he is able to
discharge the stress and fear coming from life-threatening experiences.
He does not want to die feeling upset, and in these frightening moments,
detachment allow him to accept the impermanence of his life and to
embrace death, which he knows may come at any moment.
When Morrie quotes Auden’s verse “love or perish”, he expresses the idea
that in the absence of love, life is devoid of happiness. When there is love,
thus when one is affectively attached to others, a person can experience
higher sense of fulfillment. For Morrie, love is the essence of every person
and to live without it is to live with nothing. It is clear that it is particularly
important for him as he approaches his final days. Without the loving care
of those he loves, he would perish. Morrie clings to life not because he is
afraid of dying but because he wants to share his experience of
progressive death with others so that they can release their anxiety toward
it. The idea that after his death, people will continue to love him is a
comfort to his daily pain. Thus love brings meaning to every experience
and one need others to have a meaningful life.
Thirdly, Morrie's emphasizes that each individual should reject popular
cultural values, and instead develop his own. As he sees it, popular culture
is a dictator under which the human community must suffer. In his own life,
Morrie has fled this dictatorship in favor of creating his own culture based
on love and open communication. This attitude could be seen as a revolt
against the media controlling the mind of people by promoting greed,
violence and superficiality. For Mitch, it is only when he applies his
mentor’s advice that he begins to value his life and rediscover fulfillment.
Opinion
Morrie believes in the innate goodness of human beings and
assumes that their essence is love. This optimistic and almost religious
idea of the human nature is, I believe, a normal reaction to the threat of
death. It is obvious that before he is presented with the knowledge of his
fatal disease, Morrie was not inclined toward loving others since he did not
need others. His loving attitude seems to derive solely on the individualistic
need of believing in the good of himself before dying, and of easing his
anxiety of death by receiving love from others. It is usually observed that
no true altruistic behavior exists without a deeper motive gratifying the self.
For instance, there are uncountable cases of people beginning to support
certain causes because their children or themselves are directly suffering
from a situation deprived of this cause. For Mitch, we observe that his
interest for Morrie is activated from the moment he questions the value of
his work, and also from the time he longs for his brother who is similarly
threatened by death. Thus, to Mitch, Morrie was possibly a mere substitute
upon whom he could express his care, and discharge partly his guilt of not
having cared of his brother before. Also, the prospect of making money by
selling the book, knowing that Morrie’s notoriety was at its highest, may
have motivated both characters to continue their Tuesday’s session. In
other words, human nature seems to be exclusively driven by selfish
interest, and only the union of interests can produce affective tie between
two persons.
