Doubt: A Parable
Jeff Westcott
Ignorance and Acceptance: A Guide to Taming Your Emotions
What can we know and when can we know it? If we really want to get metaphysical here we cannot really be certain of the existence of anything but ourselves. Ignorance is an inescapable truth for humans, and the sooner we accept it the better chance we have of finding truth. Doubt, as writer
Patrick Shanley describes it, is a “wordless Being [that] moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation... until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way” (p.5).
Are we giving enough consideration to this part of ourselves? There is a voice that will question what you will not. We will never escape this feeling of doubt. Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt: A Parable is about accepting this feeling, the effects of ignoring it and how it can make you question who you are.
In this play a catholic nun (Sister Aloysius) is suspicious of a Father (Flynn) of having inappropriate relations with one of the young boys at the school. It is never made clear to us whether the
Father is indeed guilty of this heinous crime (although he does leave the school because of her persistence), so we are left to interpret the play in two different ways. One, if the father was in fact guilty, the Sister’s faith in her certainty seems to save the children from future molestation. Two, if the
Father is not guilty it seems that the Sister’s inability to recognize the doubt in her conclusion makes her expel a positive member of the church based purely on her hallucinations.
The lack of incriminating hard evidence against Father Flynn makes his guilt a matter of hearsay and shesaid’s. Besides two weak assumptions made by Sister Aloysius, the only fuel for her accusation are Father Flynn’s reactions to her interrogations. Aloysius feels the need to lie to him to get her evidence. She pretends she discovered something about his past from a Nun at a former school. When she tells
Ignorance and Acceptance: A Guide to Taming Your Emotions
What can we know and when can we know it? If we really want to get metaphysical here we cannot really be certain of the existence of anything but ourselves. Ignorance is an inescapable truth for humans, and the sooner we accept it the better chance we have of finding truth. Doubt, as writer
Patrick Shanley describes it, is a “wordless Being [that] moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation... until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way” (p.5).
Are we giving enough consideration to this part of ourselves? There is a voice that will question what you will not. We will never escape this feeling of doubt. Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt: A Parable is about accepting this feeling, the effects of ignoring it and how it can make you question who you are.
In this play a catholic nun (Sister Aloysius) is suspicious of a Father (Flynn) of having inappropriate relations with one of the young boys at the school. It is never made clear to us whether the
Father is indeed guilty of this heinous crime (although he does leave the school because of her persistence), so we are left to interpret the play in two different ways. One, if the father was in fact guilty, the Sister’s faith in her certainty seems to save the children from future molestation. Two, if the
Father is not guilty it seems that the Sister’s inability to recognize the doubt in her conclusion makes her expel a positive member of the church based purely on her hallucinations.
The lack of incriminating hard evidence against Father Flynn makes his guilt a matter of hearsay and shesaid’s. Besides two weak assumptions made by Sister Aloysius, the only fuel for her accusation are Father Flynn’s reactions to her interrogations. Aloysius feels the need to lie to him to get her evidence. She pretends she discovered something about his past from a Nun at a former school. When she tells