The Last Puritan - Santayana's Spirit in The Last Puritan

Santayana's Spirit in The Last Puritan

Santayana describes Oliver as a spiritual person, and according to Santayana's ontology the "spirit is a natural observer." The trouble with Oliver is that he only knew how to "observe"; he was trapped in some sort of mystical transcendentalism inherited from his parents. At the same time, he felt obliged to follow through with the hollow duties assigned to him by his society. "It was Oliver, not I, who didn't love life, because he hadn't the animal Epicurean faculty of enjoying it in its arbitrariness and transciency...he had nothing to pin his allegiance to..." Santayana presents that the quiet tragedy of Oliver is caused by his lack of self-knowledge, the absence of a "guide to life," and the influences of a confused society. "It is the body that speaks, and the spirit that listens," writes Santayana. "Honest attention to our streams of consciousness attests to the fact that spirit is not the self but an observer of the self." Santayana identifies the quest for the good life with that of self-knowledge. But, Oliver instead tried to control his existence entirely with his spirit, and at the same time he never really knew himself, never realized where his spirit was coming from. At least, until it was too late. He repeatedly observed that his spirit was trapped at the roots, entangled, but he never quite knew why. Santayana's writes that "when spirit, in attending to the essences before it, confuses those essences with itself, it misconstrues its own nature, for 'spirit' is not a reality that can be observed; it does not figure among the dramatis personae of the play it witnesses." Wahman continues that "Spirit is always a subject, as such it can never be the immanent object of that which it observes, much less the transcendent object to which the interior datum refers."

"Oliver Alden's approach to the death prophesied by Mr. Denis Murphy stiffens the fabric of his personality, hardening to a tragic rigidity his divided allegiance, the rift of body and spirit. Death's approach also make him take on a life of his own- a life in which his author seems to have little part. In an extraordinary act of artistic self-sacrifice, of negative capability, Santayana sets Oliver free to achieve his own destiny on his own terms and allows us as readers, especially those of us who are American, to experience the pity and terror of contemplating a young man caught in our own spiritual predicament, who goes to his death with the predicament unresolved."