If you’re doing what you think is right for everyone involved, then you’re fine. So I’m fine.

The expression “If you’re doing what you think is right for everyone involved, then you’re fine. So I’m fine.” is attributed to Thomas G. Labrecque, CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, and appears immediately before Chapter 1. Its compact reasoning turns a judgment about what is right for everyone into reassurance about the speaker’s own condition. At the novel’s threshold, that move gives the maxim particular force: the opening narrator is about to confront the possibility of killing, and the statement raises the question of whether believing an action justified can make its actor morally secure.

Wording and Attribution

The expression is presented as a standalone statement, followed by Labrecque’s name and his title as CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank. The attribution places the voice in a corporate context, while the wording itself stays general: it does not identify a particular decision, name the people affected, or specify how the speaker knows what is right for them.

Its logic proceeds in two steps. First, doing what one thinks is right for everyone involved is treated as sufficient to be fine; then the speaker applies that reassurance directly to himself. The shift from a broad claim about everyone to a personal conclusion is the expression’s defining rhetorical turn.

Position at the Novel’s Opening

The statement precedes Chapter 1, where the narrator says that he has never killed anyone and wonders how a person can know beforehand that he is capable of doing so. He reflects on his father’s experience as an infantryman in the Second World War, including the likelihood that his father wounded or killed men, and asks how such an act could be known in advance. Set against that opening uncertainty, the maxim offers a sharply different mode of thought: rather than asking what an act will make of its actor, it proposes that conviction about doing right can settle the matter.

The placement creates a tension without making the statement an answer to the narrator’s question. The narrator’s concern is whether he can kill; the maxim is concerned with how a person can regard himself as fine. Their proximity invites the reader to compare readiness for violence with the self-justifying logic that might accompany it, while the opening alone does not establish that the maxim belongs to the narrator.

Ethical and Narrative Significance

The expression’s reassurance rests on the speaker’s own belief about what is right for everyone affected. Its wording does not independently test that belief against the effects on those people; instead, it moves from perceived good intention to personal absolution. That gap makes the line useful as an ethical frame for a novel that opens with a prospective killer examining his capacity for violence.

The final declaration, “So I’m fine,” gives the maxim its self-sealing quality: the speaker’s conclusion follows from a standard he has already defined through what he thinks is right. In the opening sequence, that certainty stands in contrast to the narrator’s question, which remains unresolved. The expression therefore frames, rather than resolves, the novel’s concern with the distance between feeling justified and confronting what an action entails.