Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice

Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice is a phrase the book takes from William Faulkner’s appeal for writing that rises above fear and affirms shared human values. First presented as a demanding ideal for literature, it returns in the closing pages as the narrator attempts to write about a life that might have been different, making the phrase both an inherited standard and a measure of the difficulty of meeting it.

Faulkner’s Literary Ideal

The phrase comes from Faulkner’s 1950 address in Stockholm, where he argued that writers should rise above the fear of being blown up and return to what he called the old universal truths. The six values form the positive answer to a literature preoccupied with human ugliness: without them, Faulkner warned, a story would last only a day. The expression therefore describes more than admirable subject matter; it sets a test for writing’s capacity to reach beyond fear and endure.

An Ideal the Narrator Questions

The narrator recognizes the force of Faulkner’s words but is wary of imagining the modern writer as a knight in shining armor. That skepticism complicates the phrase’s authority: its values remain stirring, while the heroic image of the writer charged with embodying them seems remote. The friend’s response to bleak literature supplies another counterpoint. She does not want more accounts of narcissism, alienation, failed relationships, and human hideousness; she fears that believing the future wholly bleak would make it easier to leave life, but cannot bear the thought of being gone while the world continues, infinitely rich and beautiful. Its persistence offers consolation that despairing accounts cannot.

Return in the Closing Pages

Near the end, the narrator describes trying to write one word after another while knowing that every word, like her friend’s life, could have been different. After repeating that she has tried, she returns to the six values as an unfinished invocation, followed by the question of whether failure matters. The phrase’s final appearance does not certify that the narrator has fulfilled Faulkner’s ideal. Instead, its placement holds the aspiration beside the limits of writing: the values can be named and carried forward, even when the writer cannot be certain that the attempt has succeeded.