Challenge 282 response:

Fiona Davis and Don Webb
discuss “The Pact”

[Fiona] I was reading over the questions in this week’s challenge, and I was thinking about “The Pact.” Why does Marty kill himself? At first glance, the action appears to be the opposite of what he talks about throughout the whole story. He argues for life but chooses death at the end. It seems clear to me that he does so out of some sense of misplaced guilt, but the way it’s presented is interesting.

Marty is finally able to face the others and tell them the truth about how he felt about the pact they’d made. If he’d been able to be honest with them while they were alive, the suicides might have been avoided.

I think guilt plays an important role in driving him to make his final decision. His feelings about breaking his promise likely played a small part as well, but I don’t think they were as influential.

You posed a question about whether misfortune justified nihilism. This is a question that will be answered differently depending on perspective. I think most people would say no, but clearly these characters disagreed.

However, I think that another question to explore is how four people could come together and find unity and friendship based on common experiences but still feel that their lives were not worth continuing. They were in a group but very disconnected from each other at the same time.

In my experience people don’t generally commit suicide if they’re connected to others on more than a superficial level. The fact that these people couldn’t find comfort from each other is really quite sad.

It’s intriguing that these friends connected to each other but were so wrapped up in their own private miseries that they couldn’t find anything else in common with each other but their pain. But suicide never makes sense to those outside of it. It requires a spiritual pain that blocks out everything else, even people who may love you. It’s hard to understand what love means when you hate yourself, and I think that’s what Marty is saying.

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[Don] Very interesting, Fiona; Bewildering Stories and all contributors, I’m sure, appreciate feedback.

Two things jump out at me in “The Pact”:

1. Marty intends to commit suicide all along. The — pardon the expression — “smoking gun” evidence is the loaded pistol in his pocket. He doesn’t bash his own brains out on a tombstone in a fit of depression and despair; he’s already made a personal philosophical choice and deliberately laid careful plans. Therefore, Marty’s arguments against suicide are hollow; he doesn’t believe them, himself. In the end, they serve only as an excuse for his procrastination.

2. Suicide is a cultural convention. An Oriental might commit suicide out of a sense of duty or shame; an Occidental would not. Rather, in Western societies, the act is either entirely interior or entirely altruistic. That is, it’s motivated either by terminal depression or by moral heroism, i.e. something done for others rather than oneself.

“The Pact” has a very contemporary setting in the reasons cited for Marty’s friends’ suicides, namely cruelties inflicted by others. Other times, other customs: the publication of Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther, in 1774, provoked not only a bizarre fashion in clothing but also a rash of “copycat” suicides.

Werther is in a triple bind: Goethe himself put it in rather flowery language but, to sum it up, Werther’s personal depression is due to social dislocation, hopeless love, and existential despair. In practical terms: he can have neither social status, nor Charlotte, nor God.

Times change. Goethe was serious; about fifty years later, Chateaubriand wrote a much more poetic version of Werther in René. A century later, Flaubert parodied Werther and René almost savagely in Madame Bovary.

Today, a motto of Shakespeare’s has more currency: “Men have died and worms have eaten them — but not for love.” And after a century and a half of arguing about God and the meaning of life, the topic has been — again, pardon the expression — done to death, and I can’t blame anyone for feeling just a little tired of it.

Marty is not Japanese or even a Middle Easterner. And Werther’s problems would seem strange to him. His and his friends’ rationale seems to be not their own beliefs but what others do.

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[Fiona] I agree with you that he planned to commit suicide from the beginning of the story. The decision to live or die was made before he set foot in the graveyard. However, I don’t really think the arguments are hollow. I think this is a case where he did believe the arguments, was passionate about his feelings on the matter, but didn’t have the courage to say the words when they would have made a difference.

His trip to the graveyard seems to be an attempt to “set things right,” which I think is why he addresses his friends as though they were still alive. It’s what he should have said at the meeting he missed, the one where they all committed the final act.

I have to wonder if he realized after they were gone how much they’d meant to him. Maybe he finally understood what it meant to connect with other people, but only after it was too late.

His decision to end his own life then may have been an attempt to recover the kinship he had lost. Perhaps he thought he would never find common ground like that with anyone else, so he had no choice but to follow them. In a way, he sacrificed everything for people he had come to love. It’s a terrible tragedy, but beautiful at the same time.

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[Don] Oh, granted, the arguments for living are not hollow in themselves. I meant “hollow” in the sense that Marty has decided in advance that they don’t prevail against his feelings of loss and injustice; and yet he recites them anyway as a litany of a faith he does not have.

I tend to see the tragedy as a bitter defeat: Marty and his friends hold resentments so overwhelming that the group finds life not worth living. But readers will all have their own reactions, and ours may or may not be representative of many.

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