Part of the reason why Nobody Owens is such a fascinating character is that he lives amongst the dead. Through the dead, Bod learns to live, not only a good life, but an extraordinary one with supernatural powers.
Most of us, unfortunately, have not been educated by ghosts so we don’t have access to the powers that Bod has. But even without the powers of the graveyard, we can gleam quite a bit from Bod’s life and apply it to our own quest for a good life.
We want to live a good life, and that means two things. First, a good life is a moral life. When we ask ourselves if we’re living a good life, few people, if any, would answer “yes” if we’re living an immoral one. A moral life enables us to live a good life. But just because we are living a moral life, it doesn’t mean that we’re living a good life, so being moral is not the only thing we need for a good life.
We don’t have to look far for examples of people who have lived morally good lives, yet not lived a good life. Good people are sometimes punished for their acts, sometimes a stroke of bad luck or unfortunate circumstances will prevent good people from living good lives. So, a good life is a life that’s pleasant, fulfilling, and happy. In Bod’s case a stroke of bad luck came early in his life, when The man Jack came and murdered his entire family.
But wait a minute. Bod’s stroke of bad luck leads him to live a good, admittedly strange and sometimes dangerous, life in the graveyard. Was it really a terrible event? I think this is the first lesson that Bod can teach us—how we’re to judge the events in our life.
Bod’s extraordinary life is the result of a terribly tragedy, the murder of his family by The man Jack. If this tragedy had never occurred, Bod would have grown up with his parents, and lived a perfectly ordinary life, without ever acquiring the powers of the graveyard like dreamwalking, fading, and an astonishing grasp of history. If we simply compare the life that Bod lives because of the book’s opening tragedy to a relatively normal life, it’s hard to argue that Bod’s life is not measurably better for the unfortunate experience.
So should we say that it was a good thing for Bod’s family to be murdered by The man Jack? That’s clearly a ridiculous statement. Murder is not a good thing, morally, but strangely enough it leads to a qualitatively better life for Bod. This is not something unique to Bod; many people have lived lives with formative tragedies in them. When I teach ethics, I use the Nazi Holocaust as an example of a clearly bad thing; however, I’ve had students who tell me that if it were not for the Holocaust, they would not exist, either because their parents or grandparents met in a concentration camp, or because of other related circumstances. Many authors and Nobel laureates owe their awards, financial windfalls, and generally comfortable lives that they live today to the events of World War II. Should we say to all of these people that it’s better that they live lives of quiet anonymity, or prefer non-existence, when it comes to my students, or should we say that they should be thankful for the Holocaust?
Saul Smilansky makes a helpful distinction here on the notion of being “sorry for” and “sorry that.” (I owe much of what I’m saying here to Smilansky’s book, Ten Moral Paradoxes.) Bod can be sorry for his parents being murdered, but is he is not obligated to be sorry that his parents were murdered. In this way, we can recognize both the moral tragedy of the situation and the qualitatively good or beneficial effects that the moral tragedy has had. The individuals who benefit greatly from the Holocaust, or who exist because of the Holocaust, can express moral outrage at the event, but not be committed to wanting it to have never happened, because that may mean that they wish they didn’t exist.
Bod lives a life that is framed by tragedy. But these tragedies do not stop him from living a good life. Far from it, his tragic circumstances help enable him to live a good life. The fact that he has overcome such challenges and adversity, like the Holocaust survivors, isn’t what makes his life a good life, it is how Bod responds to these tragedies that makes his life a good life. Lesser people may have these tragedies eclipse their lives, and who would blame them? External events have the power of ruining possibly good lives, but they are not the sole determiner of whether or not somebody has a good life. What makes Bod different? How is he able to overcome his tragedy to continue to live a good life? This leads to the second important lesson Bod has for us: a life of character.
According to the ancient Greeks, a good life was largely determined by your character. A person’s character, in the view of Aristotle, is distinguished by the kinds of virtues that that person has.
Virtues are excellences of character that allow a person, or a thing, to achieve their function well. A knife’s function is to cut, and sharpness would allow the knife to cut well. So, sharpness is a virtue of the knife. In order to develop our virtues, we would need to know the function, or purpose of our lives, so we would know what kinds of virtues we need in order to achieve our function well. This is where Aristotle’s philosophy breaks down. He argues that there is a singular purpose for all human beings: that is, a life of intellectual inquiry. We don’t need to agree with Aristotle on this point to benefit from learning what Aristotle says about virtues and applying them to our lives. Regardless of what we believe our purpose to be, or if we even deny that we have a purpose, we can all agree that there are some qualities that allow us to generally live better lives than other qualities.
Aristotle points out that virtues are not something we are born with, they are all developed through practice. Children are not particularly kind, selfless, or fair. These are virtues that they may develop over time. Bod acquires his virtues from his many teachers. His adoptive parents, Mr. and Mrs. Owens, early on teach Bod the necessity of a moral life by doing what is right, rather than what the traditions of the graveyard dictated, and caring the best they can for Bod. Mrs. Owens, in particular, thinks of caring for Bod, “doing her duty.”
Bod, later, stands up to two bullies at school, Nick and Mo, not because it would be to his advantage—quite the opposite—but because it is the moral thing to do. Aristotle calls this “righteous indignation” a proper feeling of disgust and irritation in the face of injustice. Bod learns this the same way many of us learn the things that we learn, not at a formalized school, but simply living with our parents. Through repetition of example we gain their character traits, their virtues and vices. We can also try to practice particular virtues in order to acquire them on our own, or seek out those with the virtues we wish to attain, and try to be like them.
Bod has many models of virtue to choose from in the graveyard. Many ghosts are well versed in the particulars of their time, be it the virtues that were pressed at the time or historical facts. Bod knows how things really happened from firsthand accounts from those who lived through history. But factual knowledge doesn’t translate into what Bod learns from Silas: wisdom, a classic Greek virtue that most people still value today. Silas is important to Bod precisely because he is wise.
Silas brought Bod food, true, and left it in the crypt each night for him to eat, but this was as far as Bod was concerned, the least of the things that Silas did for him. He gave advice, cool, sensible, and unfailingly correct. . . .
Transforming knowledge into good advice is not something everyone can do. Plato, in particular, believes that wisdom is “good counsel,” that is, being able to provide good advice or leadership.
Aristotle’s list of moral virtues also include, bravery, temperance, charity, truthfulness, friendliness, wittiness, modesty, and patience. Not all of these we would consider to be moral virtues, like wittiness, but Aristotle believed that good characters led people to engage in good actions, and consequently people would live good lives. Wit and friendliness would allow people to make friends easily, which Aristotle believed to be an integral part of a good life, and it’s not hard to see why.
When Scarlett Perkins declares Bod not a stranger, but a friend, Bod’s response seems only natural. “Bod smiled rarely, but he smiled then, hugely and with delight.” Friendships are intrinsically valuable, that is to say, they are valuable for their own sake, not because of the benefits we get from them, although we shouldn’t dismiss what we get from them as well. Aristotle says,
For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? (Nichomachaen Ethics, Book VIII, line 1155a5)
Liza Hempstock perhaps says it best: “Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.” Sharing our lives, and the fortunes and misfortunes we find in them, with our friends, as well as finding comfort in difficult times with them, are just some of the benefits we derive from friendship. Being entangled in other people’s lives is something most people find incredibly rewarding and entertaining, despite the costs. But we don’t want just anyone entangled in our lives. Our characters determine who we would like to befriend and who would befriend us. Virtuous character traits not only help us be good people, morally speaking, but also enhance the quality of our lives by enriching our lives with good friends.
Discussions of virtue often sound like conforming ourselves to a set formula of virtues. If we all adopt these virtues, wouldn’t we all be the same person, cookie-cutter people without individuality? The answer is easily and emphatic, “No!” But to understand why, we need to examine one more lesson that Bod’s life can give us in our search for a good life: “Authenticity.”
Authenticity is the central virtue that the existentialists, like Sartre and Kierkegaard, argue for. Authenticity is a person being true to themselves, living life honestly, rather than pretending to be someone else by conforming to what others expect of them. Sometimes authenticity is better understood through its opposite, inauthenticity. An inauthentic life is when we conform to social norms because conforming gives us comfort, not because that is what we want to do.
Living an authentic life is difficult because many of us value the comfort that comes with conformity and if we were not to conform to social norms, we wouldn’t know how to behave as “ourselves.” Many people struggle at one point in their life to “find themselves” or to “discover who they are.” “How can I be myself, if I don’t know who I am?” is the question that arises from attempting to live an authentic life.
When Bod is first discovered by the inhabitants of the graveyard, they struggle with what to call him. Each ghost explains that Bod resembles this person or that person and should be properly called that, until Mrs. Owens interjects, “He looks like nobody but himself.” Many of us can relate to the expectation of following in the footsteps of their parents’ expectations, but that expectation is felt perhaps more strongly by people who are named after their parents. The suffix “Jr.” or “the second” suggests a commonality between father and son, or less commonly mother and daughter.
Even people with similar names spark comparisons. When confronted with ghouls called “The 33rd President of the United States” and “The famous writer Victor Hugo,” it’s hard to resist the temptation of thinking about these ghouls as these figures from history. It’s equally hard not to consider the future careers of the children of famous athletes and movie stars as something other than their parents. In this, Nobody Owens has a leg up on most of us, since he doesn’t know his parents. He is truly a blank slate of expectation. He has nobody to become but himself.
Bod is also subjected to the call of conformity. He wants to be like Silas, his brave and wise guardian, but Silas is not like anyone else in the graveyard—he’s not dead or alive. He’s a vampire. When Bod says that he wants to be like his guardian, Silas tersely responds, “No, you do not.” Why don’t people want to be vampires? Eternal life, sexy clothes, perpetually good hair, why wouldn’t Bod want to be a vampire? Silas doesn’t supply an answer, but there is no need to. Bod isn’t a vampire. Bod is a living boy. Silas is steering Bod away from an inauthentic life, to a life of authenticity. Bod must be himself, a living breathing human being, instead of trying to be something he is not, the living dead.
As Bod gets older, he begins to understand the distinction, even if unconsciously. In school, Mo, the bully that Bod torments through dreamwalking later, remarks that he is weird because he doesn’t have any friends. Bod replies, “I didn’t come here for friends. I came here to learn.” Mo, understandably replies, “Do you know how weird that is?” Bod offers a shrug. Bod is indifferent to the call of conformity, because he’s already being authentic.
Referring to the The Man Jack, Bod asks, “Why didn’t Silas just kill him?” Mrs. Owens replies, “He’s not a monster, Bod.” Silas didn’t know anything about The Man Jack, nor about Bod at the time. Silas travels away from the graveyard to learn more about the threat that The Man Jack and his group of Everymen poses to Bod. Had he not, it would indeed seem rather monstrous to kill a man that he knows little or nothing about. He could have been the new night watchman or a lost tourist.
What Bod doesn’t understand at this point is that the consequences of an action don’t always dictate the rightness of an action. Bod is being authentic, but not wise. Indeed, had Silas killed The Man Jack earlier in the book, Bod would be safer. In fact, one would be hard pressed to imagine seriously negative consequences flowing from killing The Man Jack. Silas’s action was the result of his virtues. Silas is patient and wise. Would a wise person kill a man who could be innocent? Framing questions around virtues like this can allow us to determine a course of action to take from a virtue perspective. Later when Silas and Bod fight The Man Jack and his Everymen, there’s no doubt about their intentions and the danger they present. Dealing with them would be the wise action at that point in the story.
So should Bod have simply conformed his behavior to Silas’s model? It really does look as if authenticity and virtue conflict with each other. However there is wiggle room to find a resolution. First, Aristotle argues that virtues are relative to the individual, that is to say, what makes one person brave, is not what would make everyone brave. It might be brave for Bod to face down The Man Jack at the climax of the story, but it would be pure foolishness for him to face The Man Jack as a toddler. It takes little bravery for Bod to stand up to Mo, but it would take a lot of bravery for Mo’s terrorized classmates to stand up to her.
We can see that being virtuous does not necessarily condemn us all to be exactly the same. Include the additional virtue of authenticity and we have a wide variety of people, with motivation to be themselves. I can be authentic and brave, and not do what Silas does, because it would be foolish for me to engage in a fight with a menacing foe, but not for Silas.
Scarlett, however, sees things differently. After their encounter with the Sleer and The Man Jack, she calls Bod a monster. Bod tries to explain, but can’t find the words. His actions appear monstrous to Scarlett, in part because she doesn’t have the full context of the situation, and the danger that The Man Jack posed to Bod, and possibly the rest of society.
Instead of trying to explain it all, Silas wipes her memory of the events. Before he does so, Bod protests. He doesn’t want Scarlett to forget him. But a better reason for not wanting her memory to be wiped is that it would be wrong. Robbing a person of their experiences, no matter how traumatic, would interfere with their authenticity. How can Scarlett be the woman who survived an encounter with the Sleer, if she doesn’t know that she did? On this point Silas and Bod are at odds with each other. Bod doesn’t want her memory wiped for self-interested reasons. Silas wants to wipe her memory because it would be better for her and everyone else. Scarlett demands, “Don’t I get a say in this?” and it’s clear that she doesn’t.
Who’s right here? Silas and Bod are being authentic, there is wisdom in either possibility. This is a difficult decision that has no clear right answer. I’m more sympathetic to Bod here, in that not wiping Scarlett’s memory would better respect her ability to be authentic. Ideally, it would be Scarlett’s choice though. Respecting her autonomy, the ability for her to choose for herself how she will live, regardless of how inconvenient that would make either Bod or Silas’s life, seems to be the right call.
Living a good life isn’t determined by what happens to you. It’s determined by how you develop your character in response to what happens. Thinking of a good life as a life that we value for its own sake, which necessarily is a moral and authentic life. gives us a sense of empowerment. It’s not fate or chance that lets some people live good lives.
We can all learn to live good lives, from those who have come before us. They don’t have to be ghosts, werewolves, or vampires. We can learn to live a good life from the dead in history books, philosophy texts, and the stories of our past family members. We can learn from the living too, but the dead will always outnumber the living.
In the final analysis, we will never really know if we lived a good life, as this is something that can only be determined in retrospect, after we have lived. But our lives are our monuments to ourselves, and the better we build them, the more likely that future people will learn from our example.