Donaldson made sure that Covenant paid for that act
of rape throughout the trilogy. This payment was not so
much inflicted on Covenant as a physical punishment
but as an emotional one - the emotional cost of seeing
the damage he caused to the people of the Land,
for example Lena, Atarian, and Elena who was
a damaged product of that rape. Donaldson set out to
make sure that Covenant felt bad, really bad, in
terms of having a bad conscience. In the end, this
feeling of guilt, which is due to Covenant's sense of
moral responsibility, breaks down Covenant's resolve
not to act.
The Donaldson quote implies that Covenant's unbelief
was due to some principle, he does not say it was any
moral principle, he says "religious." Still, morality and
religion often require self-sacrifice, as he said. That's
really a Christian statement Donaldson is making
in that quote, it reflects the dictum of Jesus which states
that "Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it:
and whosoever shall lose it shall preserve it."
So what really is the
Power that preserves?
White gold, or some deeper principle Covenant hung
onto until the end? You can see Covenant's motives
in the Jesus quote: he spent most of the trilogy seeking
to preserve his life,
and in the end he lost his
life in the Land, rejecting the Creator's gift, in order to
preserve it in his real world.
Malik23 wrote:TheWormoftheWorld'sEnd wrote: Covenant has an extreme sense of personal responsibility.
The rape scene and his unwillingness to act in the Land makes
him appear irresponsible, but this is not true. On many
occasions Covenant takes responsibility for things that
have happened there. And at the end of the first trilogy,
he makes a decision which shows the depths of his
commitment and sense of moral responsibility. But
Covenant is also human, so there is inner conflict and
inner turmoil. In the end, however, he resolves it.
I don't know about the rape, but his stance regarding the Land is certainly a moral stance. A quote from a recent post I made describes this much better than I could.
In the GI, Donaldson wrote:
. . . if a man rejects a "fantasy world," he should be someone for whom fantasy is infinitely preferrable to reality. A man with a good life who experiences a horrible fantasy is only too grateful to label it a nightmare: that is mere self-interest. But if a man with a horrible life experiences a wonderful fantasy and *still* rejects it, that is not self-interest: it is a statement of principle; a rigorous and expensive and even self-sacrificing conviction about the nature of both "reality" and "importance"; a--in effect--religious affirmation. And *whose* "real life," I suddenly asked myself, could possibly be worse than a leper's?
