Dunbar Amnesia Novel Philosophical Concepts--The Ones I Tried To Include and Address
Essentially, in creating it, I wanted to discuss the concepts of free will, responsibility, virtue, and memory as it relates to identity. The initial premise (as you'll discover in later chapters) is: what defines a person? Is it actions, ideas, or something else? The main question I have later is: is someone responsible for actions they commit, if they have no memory of taking these actions?
I mean to supersede the idea that it was a voluntary lack of memory, such as getting blackout drunk (one chooses to do this). In the Dunbar amnesia case, Dunbar's amnesia isn't a choice he made. Does he still have responsibility for actions that he took during this time? In order to appropriately address this question, some of the works I read/re-read included pieces on Locke's concept of free will, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Scanlon's 'What We Owe To Each Other', and Rousseau's social contract. There were a few others, but these were my main ones. Arguably, some of these are more political philosophies than thought-pieces, but I would argue they're every bit as relevant.
In the question of 'what defines a person', I wanted to look at concepts of virtues. Aristotle argues that moral virtues are not inherently held, but are gained through making choices which support them (i.e. someone can be brave, but only once they've made enough 'brave' decisions that they achieve a brave character). He also makes a claim that virtues support his concept of eudaimonia, or a virtuous and fulfilling life, 'flourishing'. So then, I ask: if decisions make up who someone is, and many decisions develop their character, if someone has no memory of these decisions---does that change who they are? In the amnesia novel, I address this by Dunbar's desire to discover 'what happened' during the forgotten years. While some of it is certainly to understand the actual events that occurred, another huge part is discovering who he'd become in that missing time. After all, waking up in a plush office with his name on a plaque is something that he considers out-of-character for himself. That's the impetus for asking: "what have I become"?
Of course, his perception of himself is exactly the same as it was seven years prior, because that's what he last remembers. Is a person's being only something they perceive, or is it a sum of how others perceive them? (E.x. if I consider myself to be noble, but my actions are terrible and others see me as awful, which am I? Noble, or terrible?) The same applies in the amnesia novel: is Dunbar the person who others see him as, or does who he is exist only within his frame of reference? Initially, I argue, that he would prefer it be the former, although it's likely the latter. Personally, I subscribe to Reader Response Theory, or the idea that each piece of writing is interpreted inherently by the readers, and the meaning was always meant to exist within their interpretation (outside exclusively what the writer intended). Why not apply the same to actions, and the being of a person? Every action has the ability to be interpreted by others, and although intentions are highly relevant (see: Scanlon), who we are as people is at least somewhat defined through how others see us.
In matters of memory, amnesia challenges the fundamental idea that you're made up of your actions, or that you're defined by how others see you. It suggests that because you still have a sense of self and a being, even if you cannot remember your actions for, say, the last seven years, something is still making up you. A question: if you cannot remember the virtuous actions you took, are you still a virtuous person? Is part of what made you virtuous the fact that you had the capacity to take those actions? If people perceive you as having virtue but you can't remember being virtuous, does it still count? These questions are not answered, but I do argue in the novel that there's a greater essence that defines you, and it lies in the decisions you make and determine in the present--outside of external or past judgements and decisions.
As an aside that's a little bit further apart from my whole essay-portion here, I've intended different characters to have specific philosophical viewpoints. The Clevinger/Dunbar line-up has a few different dichotomies that I think enhance the plot if you read the characters as adhering to these different principles, whether knowingly or not. While I'd like to say that at least one of them follows deontology (actually... hm. I'm going to go ahead and say Clevinger likes to think he's a deontologist), I know that Dunbar at the very least is a consequentialist (NOT subscribing to utilitarianism). I think that's very relevant for him in the amnesia novel, as it explains why he experiences cognitive dissonance between the actions he took that he can't remember and the consequences of these actions.
Already, you have their line-up between idealistic optimism/nihilistic pessimism, deontology/consequentialism, existentialism/pragmatism, and a few others. The amnesia novel almost serves as a thought experiment in regard to these, and the benefit to having characters with different moral structures allows for debate and evaluation of the situations from multiple philosophical perspectives.
