Since I've been a student at SLUH, my English classes have always been my favorite classes. I love to explore literature and analyze the complex situations that characters must face and the decisions that they choose. Through both my discussions with some of SLUH's English teachers and my own personal contemplation, I have come to believe that by sincerely trying to understand literary characters we can come to understand our own selves better and we can even delve into a search for truth. In his book On Moral Fiction, John Gardner claims that while "the meaning of art is hard to define satisfactorily," "art, in short, asserts an ultimate rightness of things which it does not pretend to understand in the philosopher's way but which it nevertheless can understand and show mankind." He adds that "real art creates myths a society can live instead of die by," and that "wherever possible moral art holds up models of decent behavior" for us to follow. Through this search for truth, we can discover God in literature and come one step closer to achieving the Ignatian goal of finding God in all things.

Through my studies of literature at SLUH I have found that almost all literary works of importance involve some sort of deep moral dilemma. Edward Tivnan, in his book The Moral Imagination, says that a moral dilemma is "to want two incompatible things at the same time." It is often through characters' face-offs with moral issues that we as readers are able to identify with them. Whether it be Holden Caulfield struggling to find his place in what he sees as a corrupted world, Hamlet striving to seek vengeance for his father's muder without sacrificing his own mental and spiritual well-being, or Governor Willie Stark falling into political as he attempts to help the people of his state, any character worth examining must face a moral dilemma. Just as the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined character is not worth reading. A character who is not involved in a moral dilemma will in all likelihood go unexamined.

I decided that I wanted to do a research project that examines the complexity of the moral issues that certain characters face. More specifically, this project examines characters whose actions create a cloud of ambiguity over their moral standing. Moral ambiguity is always prevalent in the real world, and it is no different in the literary world. Says Tivnan, "Complex moral issues are unlikely to have simple solutions.... Surely, some things are simply right or wrong. They are indeed. But we are likely to disagree on what they are." I then chose to examine characters from movies rather than books, and chose characters from recent movies in hopes that more people could understand and relate to the characters. I also decided to present the information through this website rather than through a formal research paper for two reasons. First, because of the nature of this project, it almost has more of the feel of literary essays written for an English course than that of a research paper written for a history course, and I felt that that form would fit better in the structure of a website than in the structure of a research paper. Second, it is my hope that by presenting the information through a website it will be easier to digest than if it were in a formal research paper and that as a result more people would be able to access it. This web site may leave its viewers with more questions than answers; however, I still believe that it has served its purpose if that is the end result of viewing it. There is great complexity to the moral issues that these characters face, and there is no simple solution. I encourage anyone who visits the site to share their thoughts with me by using the email link at the bottom of this page.

On the left and right sides of this text, the four movies can be selected. The format for each movie is the same. For each movie, there is a link to the movie's official website, there is a page that gives an examination and analysis of the morally ambiguous character(s), there is a page of critical questions to consider when examining the character(s), and there is a page of quotes from the movie that are relevant to the topics discussed in the examination and questions. Below is a navigation bar that contains links to each movie's official website, as well as links to sites pertinent to this class and this specific topic, and a page of interesting quotes that I encountered while working on this project. For example, there are links to the Internet Movie Database, which is an excellent and easy-to-use site with a wealth of information about specific movies, and to the syllabus for a DePaul University course on morality in film.