Closed Morality and Open Love in Dave Eggers' What is the What

Abstract:This article attends to two key concerns in Dave Eggers' What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel (2006), namely: (1) why people don't (and do) fulfill their moral duties to those in need and (2) how to get people to do so. The novel contends that people don't help because they don't know, don't care, or aren't moved enough to act. It proposes that powerful storytelling can make people aware, care, and act. It embodies this solution by telling a moving story of Valentino, who needs help. At the same time, however, the novel is uncertain if skillful storytelling about those in need will be enough.I argue that What is the What's solutions to its two key concerns, while admirable, ultimately fall short because the novel overlooks a key factor that affects whether we meet our moral duties to humanity—our picture of morality. Our standard picture of morality codes and socializes us to fulfill our duties to family first, nation next, and finally humanity. This key insight is provided by Alexandre Lefebvre's Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson's Political Philosophy (2013), an interpretation of Henri Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935). This article contributes to a gap in the scholarship on What is the What as well as the scholarship on literature and human rights that to date has predominantly focused on the aesthetics and ethics of representing human wrongs rather than the conditions that might allow for the righting of those wrongs