Part 2, Personals: On Morality Summary and Analysis

Didion is asked to write an essay on morality, and while she is working on it she hears about an accident in the mountains in which a young man was killed and his girlfriend injured. While a nurse who had happened upon the accident took the young woman to a hospital, her husband remained with the young man's body until the police could arrive. To Didion, this defines morality, because if they had left the young man's body unattended, it would have been ravaged by wildlife before the police could arrive. Didion then poses a question to the reader: is the Donner party immoral because of what they have done to survive. Society teaches that the Donner party was immoral, but Didion suggests they merely reverted to a more primitive state of moral thought. Society...