Character Analysis: Good People By David Foster Wallace

In the short story Good People by David Foster Wallace, Lane Dean and his girlfriend Sheri Fisher are two Christians with a troubling choice ahead of them, and finds himself questioning his own ethics as a Christian. The question on whether or not they should abort their baby is making the main character question everything he has ever known and believed in. While his girlfriend is described as a model Christian and a good hard-working woman, he is described as a man who would be stuck outside of the Dante’s Inferno chased by hornets for all time. He has not the conviction to stand and speak on what he thinks is right or even to decide on what he believes is right in the first place. He is ruled by fear and never stops questioning his own convictions. Not once in the story does the character make a concrete decision and leaves his girlfriend alone in a time of uncertainty. If only for this reason alone his actions are unethical to the standards of what a man in our society should act like. Any action taken out of fear is hardly ever an ethical one. As the narrator explains his

Dean has always valued his girlfriend’s value and faith and yet as soon as they affect him he backs away from them, “She was serious in her faith and values in a way that Lane had liked and now, sitting here with her on the table, found himself afraid of. This was an awful thing” (Wallace 2). When faced with the same morality that he had once admired he backs down, which shows that he never truly considered those traits as desirable. He merely thought them to be desirable because it was what he was told was desirable. He never fully understood what her faith and value actually meant or stood for, and now that he does he is afraid that they will have a negative effect on him. To be held as an ethical human being one must hold to their ethics even if holding onto them will harm