Chapter 2 - Revenge of the Unborn

Summary

Chapter 2, “Revenge of the Unborn,” notes the way that creating characters in fiction can resemble giving birth: Dickens, Nabokov, and Flann O’Brien have all played with this idea. In Tristram Shandy the hero even talks about his prenatal existence. But no writer has imagined the dubious zone of preexistence more brilliantly than Samuel Butler. In Erewhon he invented a society where parents appear so guilty about having children that they place all blame on the “unborn.” Infants must sign a document taking responsibility for their existence. This chapter traces the many moral implications of this comic idea. It is part of a long satiric tradition that sees reproduction as one of the essential human follies, but it also looks ahead to contemporary philosophers (Parfit, Benatar, and others) who want to ask how we can impose life on beings (our children) who have not consented to it. Butler’s subsequent book The Way of All Flesh picks up where Erewhon leaves off, depicting in yet starker detail the morally questionable scenario of giving life to creatures who may one day judge their parents for it.