Selfishness in Tuesdays with Morrie

Mitch is a sport-journalist always living between two phone calls.

Ambitious and thus fully invested into his career, he merely has time to

concede to his wife or to himself. His compulsion for work derives from his

fear of death. His uncle, one of the persons he loved the most, died of a

cancer. His younger brother David also struggles against the same disease.

One day, he recognizes on a television show Morrie, the professor with

whom he used to be close acquainted with when student, dying of a fatal

disease in terminal stage. After sixteen years he made the promise of

keeping in touch with him, he decides to visit his mentor, the result of

which is their cooperation in a project whose objective is a book treating

about the meaning of life from the view point of a dying person. Every

Tuesday, Mitch and Morrie share their reflections about the world, love,

work, marriage, envy, children, forgiveness, community and aging…etc.

But along the successive sessions, Mitch witnesses the weekly progression

of his mentor’s disease paralyzing all organs from the bottom to the top.

Fourteen weeks after the beginning of the project, Morrie dies, leaving to

the world the example of his courage and positive attitude toward life and

death.

Evaluation

The major conflict of the book occurs when Morrie is led to accept

his impending death from ALS and is visited each Tuesday by his former

student, Mitch, who has become disillusioned by the popular culture. Thus

the acceptance of death, the need of others, and the rejection of popular

culture are likely to be the three main themes giving a moral sense to the

story. In the first theme, Morrie consciously “detaches himself from the

experience” when he suffers his viole...

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...ountable cases of people beginning to support

certain causes because their children or themselves are directly suffering

from a situation deprived of this cause. For Mitch, we observe that his

interest for Morrie is activated from the moment he questions the value of

his work, and also from the time he longs for his brother who is similarly

threatened by death. Thus, to Mitch, Morrie was possibly a mere substitute

upon whom he could express his care, and discharge partly his guilt of not

having cared of his brother before. Also, the prospect of making money by

selling the book, knowing that Morrie’s notoriety was at its highest, may

have motivated both characters to continue their Tuesday’s session. In

other words, human nature seems to be exclusively driven by selfish

interest, and only the union of interests can produce affective tie

between two persons.