The Ethical Divide: An Inquiry Upon Justification Versus Meaning

The discussion which our class shared over "The Second Bakery Attack" by Haruki Murakami still weasels its way into my thoughts every now and then, particularly concerning the subject of whether or not the robbery the couple partakes in constitutes necessity. For the most part my class stood on fairly even planes regarding the issue, around half of us, including myself, contending that the robbery saves their still infantile love, others leaning back upon robbery's immoral values. I however could not let go of the highly blurred moral line between the two, and how my peers and I seemed to support something so inherently wrong with such vehemence  The illegality of armed robbery does not ever come into mind as something that deserves further inquiry, yet, the severity of the robbery in the case of the troubled lovers does not seem comparable to that of such a crime. Therein, lays the point of contention. The issue with the discussion rests within the fact that the author wrote the story under the genre of fiction, fiction represents a theme, a lesson learned behind the story, and that seemed to have escaped the thoughts of those who only saw the robbery as illegal. These contenders kept retreating to the grounds of robbery's horrid nature, the illegality  the sheer horror! Yet, the author obviously did not intend to pen a short story with the purpose of simply condemning robbery. I believe the sincerity behind the robbery that arose thanks to their adventure breeds a new found intimacy among the two lovers. Thus, the author intends for the immoral characteristics of robbery to take a spot on the back burner and for the reader to simply look at the profound change within the couple's relationship and not spend so much time focusing on the crime itself. Accordingly, some of peers could not seem to grasp that concept over the injustice of the couple's misadventure. Therefore, I think that the author raises an interesting assertion by simply leaving the story open for the reader's discussion as so happened in my class. The assertion that the justification of right and wrong trumps the freedom of thought to interpret the meaning of what lays between the two. The salvaging love versus the robbery's ethical wrongness falls into this grey area and presented it's relevance to his assertion in our discussion. Thus, I can reflect on the confliction between the two standpoints as a prime example of how the author's assertion demonstrates itself in the minds of my generation. The sharp contrast between the two camps of thought among my peers, proving just how differently our synapses fire when it comes to justifying something so concrete as robbery, to something to abstract as love.