Abstract
Of the four books I have chosen to analyse in this study, Rasselas is the one most directly and explicitly concerned with human ends and their adequacy. Its most obvious subject is Rasselas’s search for a choice of life which will secure him happiness in this life. Given quite exceptional opportunity, first in a secluded utopia, and later with abnormal freedom of access to other possibilities of choice, no human end he can envisage brings him the happiness which is his end-in-view. Yet by a process never explicit, though always implicit, he is steered towards a transcendent end (which Nekayah calls the ‘choice of eternity’), and although he does not find what he seeks where he expected, he is often incidentally in possession of it (the company of Imlac and the others brings much real pleasure).
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Notes
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, translated by G. S. Fraser (1950), pp. 211–12.
Chester F. Chapin shows that Johnson was influenced in this aspect of his Christian thought by Pascal in particular. There is such remarkable similarity that Chapin’s case is indisputable. But the line of thought is, of course, to be found very widely in the Christian thought of most ages. See Chester F. Chapin, ‘Johnson and Pascal’, in English Writers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. John H. Middendorf (1971), pp. 3–16.
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© 1985 Peter New
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New, P. (1985). Rasselas: Ends. In: Fiction and Purpose in Utopia, Rasselas, The Mill on the Floss and Women in Love. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_7
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