Finding the Truth of Sobriety in the Lives of Fictional Characters

On October 6, my new book, Staying Sober One Story at a Time, will be released by Scepter Publishers. The book is an account of my 24-year recovery from alcohol addiction, as told through the fictional lives of character in four novels: The Lost Weekend, by Charles Jackson; Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry; Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh; and The Edge of Sadness, by Edwin O’Connor. This column is adapted from Chapter 1 of my new book.

My decision to use novels as the means of describing aspects of my own sobriety is not incidental. Rather, I have chosen to tell my story through other stories because our very moral lives are constructed by and within stories. Morality is not an exercise in abstract theorizing, as though the question about what we should and should not do can be separated from the rationale for why we should or shouldn’t. We are not “abstract” beings, but rather beings whose very lives are constituted within thick, complex, concrete interwoven narratives. We cannot be abstracted from the particular demands of concrete human action. Concrete contingency is the field of human moral action, not abstract theorizing.

From the age that we can understand our parents reading the simplest pre-school picture book, we begin to form our lives by and around stories. We are all familiar with the common trope, “the moral of the story” is such and such. Looking for the moral of a story is an expression of our implicit understanding that we do not tell stories merely to be entertained, or as a distraction from reality. On the contrary, looking for the moral lesson in the story is the natural impulse that flows from the reality that our lives are rooted in, and informed by, narratives. Our moral lives are story-formed. And by asking what the moral of the story is, we similarly acknowledge that story-formed virtue is the fundamental way to understand the structure of moral reasoning.

In Christian theology, the primary question for the moral life is not “what should I do?” Rather, it is the very different—and much more demanding—question, “what kind of person should I be?” As Stanley Hauerwas puts it, “Christian ethics is concerned more with who we are than what we do.” To know the answer to the question “what should I do?” does not necessarily mean that I know the answer to the question, “what kind of person should I be in order to do what I should?” But to know the answer to the question, “what kind of person should I be?” puts me on the road both to knowing what I should do (or avoid) and developing the moral skill to do it (or abstain from it). A vicious person can keep rules. He might be motivated by fear of reprisal or hope of reward. But absent those, or other self-serving considerations, the vicious person does not have the moral skill to adhere to rules because he has not learned that they lead to authentic liberation and human flourishing.

A virtuous person, on the other hand, both desires to keep rules and has developed the moral skill to do so. His adherence to the norms that lead to human flourishing is not caused by hope of reward or fear of reprisal. Rather, it is the product of the narratively formed virtues, rooted in a coherent story about what is authentically good for the human person. Virtue cannot be commanded. It can only be learned. And that learning requires the development of practices and habits that are consistent with the purpose and good of what it means to be human. Put another way, the virtues are the means by which we navigate our moral lives through the snares and dangers that impeded attainment of the ultimate good of rest in God and the derivative goods that contribute to that that highest good. The discipline necessary for the practices that become the habits we call virtues requires the rich assembly of characters and stories that teach us how to be see the world truthfully. This includes learning the skill to identify those false stories that make claims upon our lives, leading us not toward life-giving virtues but soul-destroying vices.

The temptation for Christians to reduce morality to lists of commands is not surprising. We think of the very heart of the Jewish and Christian moral tradition as the Ten Commandments, after all. But even before Moses announced the Ten Commandments to Israel, God began to condition his chosen people to remember the stories by which they were formed and sustained as a community. In Deuteronomy 8, for example, God’s instruction to Israel is not primarily about keeping commands, but rather to remember the story of their bondage in and rescue from slavery in Egypt. “[Y]ou shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness” (Gen. 8:2). They are commanded to keep the law, to be sure, but the method of doing this is by “walking in [God’s] ways and by fearing him” (Gen. 8:6). “Take heed lest you forget,” God commands (Gen. 8:11); “You shall remember the Lord your God, … that he may confirm the covenant which he swore to your fathers” (Gen. 8:18).

These admonitions to remember and heed are summarized in the Fourth Commandment, the only commandment that that describes the consequence for keeping it. “Honor your father and your mother, that your days bay be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Exodus 20:12). The consequence is the key to understanding the full implications of this command. It is not limited merely to children obeying their parents. Rather, we honor our parents by sustaining the story that we have received from them. We honor the story of our parents by telling the story to our children. The story of Abraham, Joseph and his brother, and Moses literally created the community we know as Israel. And it is the same story, completed in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, that preserves our days in the presence of God. Put another way, keeping the commandments results from maintaining the story. As Bishop Robert Barron has put it, “honoring of father and mother [is] a sort of code for … honoring of the tradition from which one has come and by which one has been unavoidably shaped.”

Israel’s very existence is created and sustained by the ongoing story of its relationship with God. Of course, keeping God’s commands is never separated from the story. But it is precisely in the story that Israel can make sense of those commands. Why, for example, is Israel commanded to be hospitable and welcoming of the stranger? And how shall Israel learn to keep this admonition? By telling and retelling their own story. “You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow’s garment in pledge,” God tells Israel; “but you shall remember that you were born a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there” (Deut. 24:17-18; see also Deut. 15:15). The very purpose of keeping the sabbath is to remember this story. “You shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day” (Deut. 5:15).

Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas expands on the importance of narrative in the life of Israel in his book, The Peaceable Kingdom. Hauerwas explains that the people of God, beginning with the history of God’s call of Abraham, is a story-formed community. Israel did not understand the stories about its relationship with God to be ancillary to its existence. On the contrary, the story of God’s call of Abraham, and, later, his rescue of Israel from Egypt, is inseparable from the very identity of God’s people. Put simply, Israel is created and sustained by a story. “[T]he Bible is fundamentally a story of a people’s journey with their God,” Hauerwas explains. Thus, he continues, “Christian convictions take the form of a story … that constitutes a tradition, which in turn creates and forms a community…. Christian ethics … begin[s] by calling our attention to a narrative that tells us of God’s dealing with creation.”

But it is not merely our account of creation that is sustained by a story. Rather, we understand the entire history of Israel and the Church in terms of the community-forming story of God’s revelation. “Narrative is not secondary for our knowledge of God,” Hauerwas explains; “there is no ‘point’ that can be separated from the story.” Put another way, we do not look for ways to abstract moral theories from the story, but rather find and sustain expressions of virtue precisely in the story. “The narratives through which we learn of God are the point.” Hauerwas is certainly correct to conclude that “the narrative mode is neither incidental nor accidental to Christian belief. There is no more fundamental way to talk of God than through a story. The fact that we come to know God through recounting of the story of Israel and the life of Jesus is decisive for our truthful understanding of the kind of God we worship as well as the world in which we exist.”

In Staying Sober One Story at a Time, I apply this understanding of the role of narrative to tell my story through those of four characters who, although fictional, illustrate truths about alcohol addiction and recovery.