panyasan wrote:Eian Flannagan wrote:Elessar wrote:I wrote "Your Mom 'n Me - Part II" for a Philosophy semester term paper for "The Meaning of Life". After writing the story itself (which after storyboarding, I actually wrote in 4 days), I wrote a character analysis on everybody and how the discussions we had in class, different philosophical ideas (stoicism, nihilism, christianity, etc) related to whether they had meaningful lives. Malcolm's was the most interesting... the hero who gets no credit... is his sacrifice still meaningful?
Aye. I'd read that analysis. You should post it!
I agree. It would be very interesting. I love discussing philosophy.
Well, I'm sorry it took me awhile to see this but I have no qualms posting this analysis, so, here goes. In reality, this is about as early as I could have posted it... regarding the latest chapters of Midnight in the Garden, as this analysis contains a few spoilers regarding Malcolm that, while easily intuited along the way, were not completely out in the open until recent chapters of YMAM3.
Enjoy!
(PS - I've already made about 4 corrections because I am realizing that, procrastinator that I am, the grammar here is a dreadful result of the rush I was in to finish. You can be sure that JT had nothing to do with it
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The Meaning of Life – A Character Analysis of ‘Just the Two of Us’ by John Orcutt
Regarding Meaning
Just the Two of Us, is a story about a man returning from a bloody war, questioning his career, his friendships; and his journey to finding the answer to a question he can’t quite put his finger on. The central character, Commander Charles “Trip” Tucker III, comes back from the Romulan War trying to understand how his boyhood fantasy of working on a starship could have lead to such a dystopian life of suffering.
His friends, former crewmates of the starship Enterprise, are also seeking closure to this war-torn epic of their lives. Although the term ‘meaning of life’ appears nowhere in the story, the essence of the question drives the interactions between the characters. As I argued in class, I believe that the most fundamental way we can define meaning such that it can be discussed objectively in a useful way, is to find what drives an individual, that which we are not ourselves without. The characters strive to find what satisfies them in the kind of real-world way that people do all the time: reflecting on the past; looking back on pleasant and unpleasant memories; seeking redemption for past failures; struggling to find satisfaction with one’s own actions; and ultimately finding the right path, be it professional, personal, spiritual to follow in the future.
Once deeply in love, Commander Tucker and Captain T’Pol fight to bridge the six-year gulf between them, while unsure whether such a reunion is possible. T’Pol, the Vulcan driven by logic, is forced to re-evaluate the reality of being a Vulcan married to a human, and faces the question of whether she can control that love. For T’Pol, there was once a time when a life of distinguished service and acceptance satisfied her completely. For Trip, an early career of innocent exploration of the final frontier broke to a life of martial duty and loss as that frontier ran red.
It is said that in peace a man will seek war within, and for Trip, the enemy’s chameleonic face takes many shapes, including his own. For each, the war held something different. For some, the time to follow brings little change in the road ahead save for the absence of blood. Others cannot speak their thoughts on the matter, and we are left to speculate for them. Each deals with the change in a way uniquely representative of one of many themes discussed in class.
Trip
Trip is perhaps the most complicated of all the characters. In the beginning of the story he is overflowing with anger. He misses Malcolm but simultaneously resents the ceremonial canonization of his death, feeling as though his friend Captain Jeffries has been cheated of similar recognition. Indecision and uncertainty are the two strongest traits associated with Trip’s character as he struggles to come to some kind of understanding of what happened to Malcolm, the horrors he witnessed and the time he lost with T’Pol. In the beginning, the loss of T’Pol is almost in the back of his mind in the sense that he is hiding from it, and though the torment of Malcolm’s memory haunts him, it also gives him cause to forget the incredible personal loss of the feelings he once invested in her.
For Trip and T’Pol, the telepathic mating bond is both literal and literary. That is, the two of them once shared a ‘real-time’ connection to one another’s minds through a process called the ‘mind meld’ that Vulcans can perform, even with non-telepathic or residually empathic races like humans. This connection can literally be a source of comfort in the sense of the ultimately private form of communication, understanding and shared burden. This was particularly valuable to Trip’s state of mind prior to the story when his sister was killed.
The bond is also a symbol of absolute companionship; a sort of fairy-tale brand of true love that for humans is an emotional state, but for Vulcans is a requisite part of any marriage. It is important to realize that the bond persists because the true kinship between the two has not abated, not visa versa. The opposite case would present a conundrum of free will versus the urge to love. For Trip, the bond itself is not as primarily responsible for his feelings of loss, since, as a non-telepath, separation began to weaken the link for him instantly, whereas T’Pol required conscious distraction. The bond has always been for Trip a simple byproduct of being in love with T’Pol rather than an integral part of the emotional structure inside him, such as is the case for T’Pol. Without a bond, a Vulcan feels no compulsion to succumb to emotional attachment.
Ultimately, the question ‘Does Trip lead a meaningful life?’ is not all together resolved. For the majority of the story, he becomes more convinced that resigning his commission is what he wants. What exactly he wants to do with his life after that is something of a mystery, but we can presume he would have designs on patching up his relationship with T’Pol. In the end, a sense of ‘meaning’ as far as Trip is concerned boils down to happiness. If asked, Trip is not the kind of person to say that Malcolm had a meaningful life because he sacrificed himself for a greater cause. Trip’s friends and loved ones are central to his satisfaction in life, replacing what was once invaluable to him: his career. Resolving his conflict with Archer and ridding he and T’Pol’s relationship of any equivocations goes a long way for someone like Trip to feel his life has meaning. In the end, Trip is not completely happy because he will most likely never completely rid himself of the nightmares, visions, and flashbacks of the horrors he witnessed or the friends that he lost. The assistance T’Pol has brought to him, to alleviate the despair in a small way, is a token of the kind of focus that regaining her companionship can bring to his life. Loving T’Pol is at one time, both an end, and now that he has suffered so greatly, also a means to find greater happiness. Were he never to recover completely and still have flashbacks or visions, he may not find complete happiness and thus in his definition, complete meaning, but in being with T’Pol he will be as close as he can get.
The final step may be what ends up happening with the job he is offered. In the end, he may still decide to resign his commission, but with T’Pol as his anchor, will feel more satisfied in any endeavor that comes.
T’Pol
T’Pol is a character also facing a transformed lifestyle. T’Pol left the Enterprise before the war to assume a position she knew would distance her from Tucker. Even during a time when their love had been no stronger, the drive to be useful and serve the greater cause ran too deeply through T’Pol to reject the promotion Archer offered. Her decision was born from feelings of obligation rather than personal ambition. During the war, she buried her unsatisfied yearning for Trip with duty and responsibility, and soon she arrived at a state in which these things satisfied her.
When the war ended, however, T’Pol faced two things that brought this harmony into question: the proximity to Trip causing the bond to resurface almost immediately, and the opportunity to continue her career near him. T’Pol’s inner conflict is primarily defined by the struggle between her roots as a Vulcan, her rearing and training to be logical and dedicated to selfless duty; and the undeniable drive of a Vulcan’s need to mate. Along with fragments of human values she has picked up from her crewmates, it is the existence of this complication to her personality and the uniqueness of her pairing with Tucker - a human - which necessitates a search for self.
When T’Pol first took her assignment on the Enterprise, the previous record for a Vulcan serving on a human vessel had been eight days, largely due to their inability to tolerate human emotions and impulsiveness. When T’Pol stayed aboard Enterprise for several years, left the High Command for Starfleet, and then bonded with a human, she was practically excommunicated, looked down upon by her peers and lost the professional respect she yearned for. Early on, this forced her to begin finding meaning and fulfillment in sources other than her own people. After the war, T’Pol again battles with the vestigial feelings of obligation to serve an organization rather than seek her own personal goals. Within their own society, Vulcans are expected to make decisions solely based on responsibilities to family and service, never self. T’Pol continues to struggle with the distinction between seeking her own goals and sacrificing them, living up to a selfless standard that she was raised to.
Secondary to the conflict between her goals and obligations, is a sense of frustration at being bonded to Tucker. While they are apart, the bond feels like a restriction, a constant aching in the back of the mind like an empty stomach. This contributes to T’Pol’s feeling of being directionless, with too many paths before her to feel confident choosing any of them. When Trip and T’Pol spend some time together, however, T’Pol begins to feel more at ease, more able to cope with the question of what to do with her career. The paradox of a Vulcan’s bond to another is that Vulcans reject all emotion because if they succumb, their emotions are primal, uncontrollably violent and destructive. But since they cannot reject procreation, they are forced to take a mate, and find even greater peace and focus than before, rather than having their control constantly compromised.
Confronted with two contradicting loves, T’Pol makes a compromise between her career aspirations and her desire to be able to start a life with Trip, by accepting the job teaching on Earth.
Archer
Unlike his friends, Jonathan Archer’s path is largely unchanged by the war, inasmuch as his career is concerned. Archer joins Starfleet with the much the same naivety as Commander Tucker, who he was friends with before their Enterprise posting. Both are sustained by the drive to explore, but for Archer it is much stronger. Part of this comes from the natural isolation of a captain from his crew. He makes friends among the crew but retains a barrier between them as any captain must, since his values prohibit him from allowing his personal feelings to influence command decisions. Archer’s sense of duty is also derived from an aspiration to live up to his father’s legacy, Henry Archer, who designed the very engine at the core of the Enterprise. Henry Archer died when Jonathan was a young boy.
Living through the war did change Archer in that he withdrew even more from personal relationships with his friends. With the weight of thousands of lives on his shoulders, Archer adopted the responsibilities with diligence, sacrificing attention to those for whom he cared most, among them, Hoshi. Before the Enterprise was launched, Archer and Hoshi were long-time friends, and he recruited her for the mission. She also suffered torture at the hands of the Xindi long before the Romulan conflict because she was a skilled translator, capable of discerning their language. For a long time Archer blamed him self. The cost of his dedication ran high, and after the war Archer seeks to mend the wounds between he and Trip, and find redemption for the guilt he feels for what happened to Hoshi.
In the end, however, Archer’s needs to feel meaningful have almost completely evolved into service of the growing Coalition of Planets.
The Lost: Hoshi, Jeffries, Malcolm, and the Romulans
It is a particularly thorny question to debate the meaningfulness of lives of those who are dead, or in this story, those whose thoughts and actions do not appear so that we can study them.
Hoshi’s circumstance is unique due to her injuries, and for her friends, the uncertainty of their extent only clouds the issue further. Can someone consigned to never again speak have a meaningful life, if such is her fate? Does it hold meaning for her to tell Jon that it isn’t his fault, if he can’t hear her, if those words are forever encased inside her self? These are questions I honestly cannot answer, but can only respond that it would be the hope of all of her friends that Hoshi understands that she is loved and cared for. In such a case as this, hope can become as important as reality, since Hoshi’s handicap means there is no absolutely right or wrong answer. Ignoring her and assuming she can’t understand anybody and relegating her years away to living in a hospital staring at a wall would irreparably damage the individual inside. The fact of the matter is, they just wouldn’t know. And for that reason, I think it would be meaningful for Jon and the others to treat her as if she can understand everything perfectly, as they would have had her injuries never occurred. Her life, then, would still mean something to them.
Captain Matthew Jeffries is the unknown sacrificial lamb, the dutiful son of Starfleet that lost his life and, though very close to Trip’s heart, gets lost in the casualty lists of hundreds of thousands. Those close to him, particularly Trip and his former crew on the Endeavor certainly did not forget him. But his sacrifice was not glorified like Malcolm’s. If Captain Jeffries died believing that losing his life was worth it if it meant the war would eventually bring peace to the quadrant and safety for Earth, then his life is meaningful. Is victory a necessary condition for meaning? It is certainly not a sufficient one, since it is difficult to imagine an abhorrently anti-war draftee’s death being considered meaningful by his own estimation, even if the war was won. Since the Romulans lost the war, were their lives meaningful? Each individual would have to be examined and it determined whether they were fulfilled by sacrifice to the empire, truly and wholeheartedly, not in a superficial or propagandized way.
Finally, there is Malcolm Reed. As indicated in the story, there is a possibility that Malcolm did not in fact die in the battle, somehow transporting himself away, perhaps through his intelligence contacts. The intriguing question is not, ‘Is Malcolm’s death meaningful since he didn’t die?’ but ‘Can Malcolm have a meaningful life now that he is alive but nobody knows it?’ His attempt to slip a hint at the end of the story aside, if Malcolm survived under the auspices of a Section 31 extraction, it is likely his life is to be one of solitude and service. The question regarding service, then, is ‘Does it have to be recognized?’ Archer, T’Pol, Trip; all of their service to Starfleet was recognized. Even in a small way, so was Jeffries’.
Malcolm is, perhaps, one of the most difficult characters to argue for a meaningful life because he was quite close to his friends, and will invariably suffer despair at being apart from them. In addition, it is detailed in the end of Startling Discoveries and recalled in the Prologue of Just the Two of Us, that Malcolm feels a responsibility to protect Trip and T’Pol from Romulan aggression. Mentioned throughout the story are individuals with British accents, intended to suggest, once it has become clear that Malcolm survived, that all of these people could actually be Malcolm Reed in disguise. Undercover, closely protecting his friends but never able to reveal himself, never able to reminisce their near-death experience aboard Shuttlepod One with Trip, spend an evening taking care of his former romantic interest Hoshi Sato, or once again pledge allegiance to his former Captain and serve valiantly, can Malcolm Reed feel meaningful?
Perhaps.
Did I get a feeling of whopping uncertainty and confusion YEAH that came through. Everything else you said was very well portrayed in your work. 
