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Matthew Kimberlin (no login)
Posted Mar 10, 2008 3:12 PM
I found the novel’s constant reference to free will interesting. Throughout the novel Michel seems to believe that humans lack free will and are the result of their environment. On page 148 the narrator, seeming to express Michel’s thoughts, says:
“Was it possible to think of Bruno as an individual? They decay of his organs was particular to him, and he would suffer his decline and death as an individual. On the other hand, his hedonistic world view and the forces that shaped his consciousness and desires were common to an entire generation. Just as determining the apparatus for an experiment and choosing one or more observables made it possible to assign a specific behavior to an atomic system- no particle, now wave- so could Bruno be seen as an individual or, from another point of view, as passively caught up in the sweep of history.”
The book continuously questions the existence of human free will. When Annabelle’s mother dies Michel understands that “one could not battle against the empire of sickness and death” (234). This sentiment is echoed when Christiane commits suicide, the narrator suggests that “weighing up of pleasure and pain, which everyone is forced to make sooner or later, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide” (204). The narrator implies Christiane’s suicide, which can be viewed as the ultimate act of free will, was inevitable. The book also creates a history of individualism which portrays the individual as a source of violence and destruction. The fall of Christianity is linked to sexual permissiveness which results ultimately in violence. Bruno tells the story of a writer David Macmillan who writes “having exhausted the possibilities of sexual pleasure, it was reasonable that individuals, liberated from the constraints of ordinary morality, should turn their attention to the wider pleasures of cruelty” (171-175). Does the novel advocate the abandonment of individualism? The novel seems to suggest that people can exist without free will as a collective unit.
Questions
1. The novel ends with a world seemingly devoid of division and individualization, but one that is successful. Is Houellebecq suggesting this would be a better world?
2. Does the question of free will play a large role in the book, or are the passages I have cited isolated incidences?
3. Is the fact that Michel and Bruno represent different facets of human society but both die isolated from human contact important?
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