The paper investigates non-conformism through a case study of one short story by Alice Munro, selected for its exemplariness in terms of adumbrating the principle of esprit libre.
The story comes from Munro’s tenth collection: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001). It is called “Comfort” and tells the last years in the life of Lewis Spiers, a Biology teacher from New Zealand who settled in Canada and fell a victim to persecution from fundamentalists who aimed at compelling him to give equal time to the teaching of evolutionism and creationism. Out of uncompromising dedication to scientific data, Lewis refused to bow in and tendered his resignation. He shortly afterwards discovered that he suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and he chose to commit suicide.
Lewis’s life will be analysed in terms of what Judith Butler has called “Giving an Account of Oneself” and Adorno’s “becoming human.” Lewis’s relationship with the high school community will be envisaged as a scene of address in which he is committed to answer the question, “Who are you?”.
The question about the genealogy of the subject implicates the problem of responsibility, of ethical violence and the social status of truth: it is an allocutory act which consists in rendering public the relationship with the self, what Foucault has called parrhesia. This paper aims at coming to terms with the idea that telling the truth about oneself in public might ultimately be the purpose of literature.