Moral Ambiguity and Forgiveness Theme Analysis

Throughout The Man in the High Castle, the characters must make difficult moral decisions: Mr. Tagomi, a mild-mannered Japanese bureaucrat, is forced to kill two men to save another, and Baynes, a dissenting German spy, must join forces with a repugnant Nazi to stop a horrific nuclear war. As Tagomi, Baynes, and the other characters make moral choices, they are forced to reckon with the impossibility of morally pure behavior in a fundamentally compromised society. But none of the characters retreat from the world or renounce their responsibility to it—in fact, by the end of the novel, once-reclusive writer Hawthorne Abendsen has even returned to public life. The Man in the High Castle thus suggests that forgiveness is necessary in navigating an imperfect world—if any action has the potential for harm, then all people can do is try their best and seek absolution for the pain they did not mean to cause.

After finding themselves forced to act in a way that violates some of their most deeply felt beliefs, various characters reflect that true moral purity is impossible in their messy post-war world. Having killed two members of the Nazi Kommando squad, Tagomi laments that “there is no Way in this; all is muddled. All chaos of light and dark, shadow and substance.” Tagomi has committed these murders for a good reason: had the Nazi assassins been successful, Baynes would have died and Japan would have come under nuclear attack. Yet Tagomi has still killed two men, so his good deeds are inextricably “muddled” with his bad ones. That confusion is echoed when Baynes—having allied himself with one of the most violent Nazis of all—comes to term with the fact that there are not “clear good and evil alternatives”; “we do not have the ideal world […] where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.” Just as Tagomi struggled to distinguish between “light and dark,” Baynes too feels a lack of clarity. At the same time, he accepts the necessity of such confusion: while tough moral dilemmas would not exist in an “ideal world,” the complex reality of post-war life necessitates difficult questions. More than any other character, Juliana—made to kill her lover Joe in order to prevent his assassination of Abendsen—seems to collapse in the face of her moral quandary. While Juliana murders Joe, she is never quite sure of her actions; her thoughts are rendered in abstract, stream-of-consciousness prose (which at points simply veers into word association). Here, the novel’s moral “chaos” becomes literal, as readers are forced to struggle with thinking through an impossible choice right alongside the characters.

In order to deal with this ambiguity and guilt, several of the novel’s central figures turn to almost spiritual ideas of forgiveness—whether they are seeking it or practicing it with others. Tagomi, “crav[ing] forgiveness,” begins to seek solace in the doctrine of Original Sin. Earlier, Baynes mentioned that in this religious schema, wrongdoing is “destiny, due to ancient factors.” According to this Christian doctrine (and, to a lesser extent, to the I Ching), harm is unavoidable but also reparable; if sin is an inherent part of life, then so is repentance. Antiques dealer Childan, hurt and mystified by his client’s dismissal of a beloved jewelry line, is able to successfully ask for an apology. Moreover, when his client Paul does actually apologize, Childan feels a new sense of clarity, “as if [he] rose to the surface and saw unencumbered.” Though the characters struggle with the “chaos” of moral ambiguity, apology and forgiveness here are offered as antidotes to that chaos—Childan and Paul, in forgiving and being forgiven, are able to “[see] unencumbered” in a world too often “muddled.” And tellingly, though Juliana spends much of the novel angry with her ex-husband Frank, in its closing moments she begins to consider going back to him. This concluding note of reconciliation leaves readers to dwell on the value of forgiveness.

Just as The Man in the High Castle seems to suggest that bias is a cross-cultural stain, it also implies that forgiveness is a kind of universal answer (Tagomi looks for absolution in both the I Ching and the Western doctrine of original sin, for example). The novel therefore suggests that in an increasingly globalized and complicated world, the principle of forgiveness can help each person make sense of otherwise impossible moral quandaries.