The Other Boat Essay -- Other Boat Edward Morgan Forster

The Other BoatWho am I? Why do I do what I do? When can I fall in the rules of society without being guilty? In the unique agony of seeking understanding, acceptance, and love, these several questions echo touchingly end-to-end human history. For all people these introspective problemswhile difficultdesperately need answers, as answers to these questions dictate the choice to stay within the bound of accepted ethics or to step out. The importance and difficulty of finding good answers to these questions intensifies for atheists and agnostics, since they must formulate answers with the full responsibility for their conclusions resting on their own shoulders. No religion can answer these questions for them. Thus, Forster, a humanist who shunned organized religions and endorsed the creation of individualistic creeds, if choosing to step out from established laws and customs, must ask, on his own, if his justifications hold true(a) or if they converge with all other crimes against so ciety. The Other Boat contains many of Forsters personal humanistic moral perspectives on many issues including class conflict, colonization, racism, and adultery. However, intimately centrally, through a perspective of naturalistic fatalism, The Other Boat contains Forsters personal moral justifications for homosexuality.Readily available contexts for discovering and analyzing Forsters moral justifications appear throughout critical scholarship on The Other Boat, yet many critics overlook these humanistic conclusions. In a biographical essay on Forsters life, Carrol Viera notes that the compendium The Life to Come and Other Stories, which includes The Other Boat, has generally been analyzed by critics from two perspectives. Most critics, she says... ...ose difficult recurring questions, and from his own unique perspective he answers boldly I am a homosexual. I do what I do because my nature dictates I must do it. I can break the rules of society without being guilty for nature d isallows doing otherwise. These arguments for justified homosexuality live on today, and in many ways Forsters naturalistic answers remain the governing answers given by modern homosexuals. Through The Other Boat Forster gives their moral argument an early and eloquent voice, and though we agree or disagree we should proclaim him for that. Works CitedForster, Edward Morgan. The Other Boat. The Norton Anthology English Literature. Ed. Stephan Greenblatt. Vol. F. New York W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.Viera, Carrol. E. M. Forster. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. John H. Rogers. Vol. 162. Detroit Gale Research Company, 1996.