Life Narratives of The Nones: LOST or Found?

by Steve Neumann

In the drama of real life we not only want to be ourselves, we want both our character and the larger plot to be genuinely meaningful, not simply the result of a good plot and good performance. —Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul

This blog devotes a lot of time to discussing moral philosophy. Now it seems almost axiomatic to me that morality and meaning are two sides of the same coin, and thus inseparable. And the most common metaphor for the manifestation of meaning is the idea of life as a narrative story. As literary critic Daniel Mendhelson puts it, echoing Flanagan:

People want real life to be amazing. We’re creatures of narrative. That’s how we make sense of the world. And stories are aesthetic, from the start. We want our experience to be a story, to have a beginning, a middle and an end.

So I want to focus on how those without a strong religious belief, or even no religious belief at all, pursue the project of achieving meaning in an ambiguous, intractable world. I want to focus on the so-called “Nones”; and I want to use the recent TV drama LOST as a vehicle for exploring how they might navigate the vagaries of existence, as well as considering two divergent views on the life-as-narrative metaphor itself.

But first, who are the Nones? As The Pew Forum recently reported: “The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public — and a third of adults under 30 — are religiously unaffiliated today.” Of course, it’s been pointed out that this doesn’t mean they’re all atheists; nor does it mean that they don’t utilize or draw upon religious or other spiritual traditions to some extent in their search for meaning. But I think it’s safe to say that they don’t abide bromides like “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.” And, they most likely experience more doubt in their individual quests.

All of the main characters of LOST seem to be Nones. None of them (no pun intended) exhibit anything close to a traditional Evangelical Christian mentality, for instance, or a Prosperity Gospel outlook like Joel Osteen. Yet each of them moves within a cloud of quasi-religious feeling, and their backstories all include some religious reference or motif, however subtle or generic it may be. Out of an unusually large ensemble cast, there eventually emerge seven main characters. For brevity’s sake I’ll only be considering one of them: Desmond Hume. Desmond is a forlorn romantic who, despite his best intentions and efforts, seems to be his own worst enemy, allowing his life to be largely defined by cowardice and failure. 

As a little background for those unfamiliar with the show, the characters of LOST have all been guided to a mysterious island by an even more mysterious figure known as Jacob. The character of Jacob can be considered a god-like, quasi-supernatural being who was born on the island. This island possesses some very strange and special properties, most likely due to an unusual and fortuitous concentration of electromagnetic energy and exotic matter. It turns out Jacob’s own special powers are a result of living so close to the Island’s “Source,” along with his mother and fraternal twin brother. This source, the archetypal mother tells us, is a beautiful light in a cave at the center of the island and is the origin of “life, death, rebirth”, and

...a little bit of this very same light is inside of every man. And if the light goes out here, it goes out everywhere. And so I’ve protected this place. But I can’t protect it forever.

And so Jacob guides our characters to the island in the hope that one of them will be his replacement since, like his mother before him, he cannot protect it forever either. But in addition to trying to find a replacement, Jacob is also interested in proving his brother wrong. His brother is the nameless “evil” antagonist of the show, known to fans as the “man in black,” and he harbors a less than favorable view of humanity. A memorable flashback scene involving the two brothers’ opposing views is distilled nicely in a bit of dialogue as they sit on the beach in the year 1867, watching a tall ship approach the island:

JACOB: I take it you’re here ‘cause of the ship.

MAN IN BLACK: I am. How did they find the Island?

JACOB: You’ll have to ask ‘em when they get here.

MAN IN BLACK: I don’t have to ask. You brought them here. Still trying to prove me wrong, aren’t you?

JACOB: You are wrong.

MAN IN BLACK: Am I? They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.

JACOB: It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.

Throughout the six seasons of the show, we follow each character’s pre-island, on-island and post-island life, as they negotiate various arduous environmental and social situations, as well as the covert machinations of Jacob and his brother. Each week we watch with bated breath as they strive, achieve, fail — and strive again. We get inextricably caught up in each one’s narrative, as well as the overarching narrative of the show, its “mythology,” as the show’s writers call it. And the title of the drama itself has several meanings: the characters are each lost in some way; the island is lost in time and space due to its unique properties; and all of existence itself might be lost if the ambiguously evil antagonist has his way. 

In the final season, after the characters have experienced and suffered much both on and off the island, the purpose of their lives, as defined by Jacob, is revealed to them:

SAWYER: Tell me something, Jacob...What made you think you could mess with my life? I was doin’ just fine ‘til you dragged my ass to this damn rock.

JACOB: No you weren’t. None of you were. I didn’t pluck any of you out of a happy existence. You were all flawed. I chose you because you were like me. You were all alone. You were all looking for something that you couldn’t find out there. I chose you because you needed this place as much as it needed you.

So while the show doesn’t explicitly endorse any one religion’s eschatology, it does ultimately employ the theme of life’s meaning being ordained by a divine figure. Also, in the penultimate scene of the final episode, where all the characters are reunited in a limbo-like afterlife, the “explanation” of the show is revealed inside a church; but the stained glass window incorporates the symbols of all the world’s major religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Taoism. 

Sociologist Richard Sennett, in his essay Humanism, explicitly endorses the life-as-narrative metaphor and cites the efforts of religious Renaissance humanists such as Pico della Mirandola, who lived from 1463 to 1494: 

Pico imagines God the Master Artisan speaking to Adam, his unfinished creation, as follows, “in conformity with thy free judgement, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself.” These words had the personal meaning to Pico that, as a displaced person, he would have to make up a life for himself.

Sennett further wonders if, since human beings are initially indeterminate creatures, the chance events of a life can be made into a coherent whole; that is, a meaningful story. Sennett says that one must become a narrator who learns “how to tell about disorder and displacement in his or her own life in such a way that he or she does not become confused or deranged by the telling.”

Our characters in LOST are unquestionably displaced, and the island itself is literally displaced in time and space; so there is much in the show that would easily lead the characters into confusion and derangement. But isn’t there much in real life that can derail its course? While Sennett focuses on modern capitalism as the main source of this disruption, citing forces that “deregulate people’s experience of time: new technologies, global markets, new forms of bureaucratic organization,” etc., we could also add an increasing number of environmental tragedies such as hurricanes and other storms that can physically and psychologically displace us. Further, Sennett says that though there might be those with a postmodern bent who celebrate or welcome a certain amount of existential discontinuity or ambiguity, most of us “need, like our Renaissance forbears, to find principles of continuity and unity in how [we] account for [our] material existence.” I think this is true for the majority of us. 

Against Sennett’s thesis, however, philosopher Galen Strawson argues that not only do people exist who don’t feel the sense of continuity that Sennett and others believe is essential to be human and obtain human meaning, but he claims that this is a normal and even fulfilling way to be. Strawson, in his paper Against Narrativity, calls those whom Sennett describes “Diachronics,” and says that they think of themselves as the same throughout their lives; that their 4 year-old self is the same as their 40 year-old self, for instance. Strawson calls the others “Episodics,” and says that their defining characteristic is that they don’t feel themselves to be the same self even from moment to moment. Further, he says:

Some think that an Episodic cannot really know true friendship, or even be loyal. They are refuted by Michel de Montaigne, a great Episodic, famous for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie, who judged that he was ‘better at friendship than at anything else.’

Strawson’s thesis certainly has implications for finding meaning in life. If one is truly an Episodic, how does one work on the kind of long term projects that tend to constitute meaning in life for many of us? If one is a jumble of disjointed moments and experiences, how can one organize oneself long enough and consistently enough to devise and execute a life-plan, if at all? 

In our fictional LOST universe, Desmond Hume desperately seeks the continuity and unity that will give his life the meaning it so sorely lacks. He is the one character on the show who has had the most detrimental exposure to the spacetime-bending properties of the island; as a result, his consciousness is sent back and forth through time repeatedly. In fact, he is not unlike Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, being “unstuck” in time. Desmond had been guided to the island when he entered a round-the-world boat race in order to prove his quality to the father of his love interest, Penny. Penny’s father is a ruthless and wealthy business magnate, and does not approve of his daughter being in a relationship with someone of such low status. 

A Scotsman, Desmond worked as a meagerly-paid set designer for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and didn’t attend university because he had to support his three brothers after the death of their father. Inclined to be somewhat of an itinerant by nature, he had joined a monastic order after ending a marriage engagement during a bout of drunken cold feet. Then, while he’s being kicked out of the order for quaffing the monastery’s wine, he meets Penny, they fall in love, and finally move in together. After enduring the scathing rebuke of Penny’s father while asking for her hand in marriage, he again gets cold feet, they break up, and Desmond joins the Royal Scots Regiment, from which he ultimately gets dishonorably discharged for a failure to follow orders.

Due to the aforementioned exposure to an inhuman amount of electromagnetic energy, Desmond’s consciousness begins traveling forward and backward in time (don’t ask me how; it’s a plot device!). Not only has his pre-island life up until this point been characterized by fragmentation, but now his very subjectivity is splintered. The unpredictable twists and turns of time travel drive him into a sort of fatalism. But before coming to the island, we see that Desmond sought to assuage his existential angst by throwing himself into various social conventions: marriage, religion, military service — and, of course, alcohol. Since becoming an inadvertent time-traveler, however, his hunt for meaning has taken on an even more intense pressure: not only does he somehow have to “create and carry together into one what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident,” as Nietzsche put it, but if he can’t figure out a way to stabilize himself, he’s going to die of a brain aneurysm within a matter of days (again, a plot device!). 

Desmond is advised by another character — a physicist savant, so to speak — to identify a “constant” that is present in both his past and his future. This constant can be a person or an object; but the effect of the constant is to bring stability and coherence to his discontinuous experience, thus grounding him again and enabling a meaningful continuity. It is precisely this continuity that Sennett sees as necessary for a meaningful life narrative:

To find one’s voice requires establishing some distance from the immediate, from the noumenal; sheer surrender to the moment weakens one’s voice.

Finding one’s narrative voice is like finding one’s constant. If Desmond continues to focus on the effects and affects of each time-shifting moment, he’ll go crazy; but if he can exercise some self-discipline and concentrate instead on Penny, his confidence returns, his narrative resolve is strengthened, and his life is sustained. Penny becomes Desmond’s “condition of preservation and growth,” in Nietzschean terms; it provides him with the ability to act meaningfully in a world that otherwise lacks meaning. It enables him to tell his own story.

So I think that, whether one is Diachronic like Sennett recommends, or Episodic like Desmond and Strawson (by his own admission), one can still secure the Holy Grail of existence — a meaningful life. The act of creating one’s life narrative, of picking and choosing what to value, which projects to pursue, etc., is possible whether one feels oneself to be the same over time or whether one feels oneself to be constituted only in the moment. And I think this may be characteristic of the Nones in particular, provided they can find their narrative voice (their “constant”); because since the Nones are largely untethered from traditional religious belief, whether they reject it altogether or incorporate it buffet-style, they are therefore unencumbered by ordinary constraints, thus allowing their experiments of life a freedom of play not available to those ensconced in traditional religious trappings.