Soseki and the moral imagination: 'Mon', 'Kokoro', and 'Michikusa'

This dissertation is a study of the moral imagination in three of the late novels of Natsume Soseki (1867--1916): Mon (The gate; 1910); Kokoro (The heart; 1914); and Michikusa (Grass on the wayside; 1915). Situating Soseki's fictional project within the international literary movement of modernism, the dissertation advances an analytic of the moral imagination corresponding to the tradition of moral enquiry that includes Aristotle and Augustine. In modernity the reflective subject of interiority, which has traditionally been predicated on a teleological narrative of virtue, is divorced from the communities of moral reflection and instruction necessary to sustain that interiority and avoid despair and meaninglessness. Soseki's three late novels examine the attempts of the modern self of interiority to respond to a universe that is increasingly perceived either as indifferent, the empty universe of nihilism, or as hostile, the universe of gnosticism. Mon portrays the fall into modernity as an entrapment in a dialectic between the obligations of an ethical self, whose teleology is conceived in relation to the family, and the desire for release from the ironies of fate through the pursuit of sublime experience. Kokoro examines the possibilities of an ethical response to the mediation of desire and its engendering of the community of violence. In the savagely ironic cosmos of Michikusa , the protagonist Kenzo struggles for literary creativity only to uncover, through his inability to escape the twin entrapments of history and the family, the gnosis of his true identity as a secret agent of death and sterility.