| This dissertation explores the relationship between moral luck and twentieth-century American fiction. While luck is often associated simply with a lack of knowledge -- with ignorance of true causes, physical laws, and so on -- I argue that knowledge can never be comprehensive because not only is the amount of knowledge available at any given time a matter of luck, but, further, that what counts as knowledge is itself a function of luck. To explore this claim, I turn, in Chapter One, to the philosophy of "moral luck," as first developed by Bernard Williams. Williams argues that much of what we can say about ourselves, to be coherent, must include external factors: the contingent circumstances we find ourselves in, the unexpected consequences of our actions, and the radically unpredictable trajectory of our lives. These things require a narrative that unfolds them over time by forging meaningful connections between later and earlier events. Some sorts of knowledge are thus only accessible through the narrative process because they are created by it.;In the following chapters, I investigate how moral luck illuminates several central aspects of twentieth-century American fiction. In Chapter Two, I argue that James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man recasts race as a meaningful category because it is arbitrary, and resists the legitimacy of "passing" by demonstrating that identity is rooted in the contingencies of one's circumstances, not in their transcendence. Chapter Three argues that William Gaddis's The Recognitions exemplifies the mid-century move away from modernist modes of representation, particularly the idea of a (luck-resistant) "pure aesthetic," to modes that engage the contingencies of context, history, and artistic form. In Chapter Four, I turn to postmodern visions of deterministic history by examining Don DeLillo's Underworld, in which later events retroactively re-inscribe the content and meaning of earlier events -- a fundamental claim of moral luck itself. The Conclusion speculates about the future of luck, particularly in terms of technological advances. Despite our best efforts to argue it out of existence, luck will always persist, I conclude, because of the agonistic nature of human knowledge, and the finitude of human life. |
