The Evening and the Morning and the Night

Butler’s imaginative creation of a near-future scenario in which a heritable condition is created by the cure for cancer introduces a scientific conflict that is somewhat plausible. However, Butler is ultimately far less interested in the hard details of how an illness like Duryea-Gode Disease (DGD) could come about than she is in using it to explore what it means to be human. To that extent, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” is a very human story in that the central characters are coming to terms with their mortality and their moral responsibility to those around them.

The theme of Illness, Marginalization, and Institutionalization is central to the motivations of the characters in the story. The main characters frame their experiences and their worldviews through their status as DGDs, including the social stigma and the seemingly inevitable short and miserable lives that will result from the condition. Though both Alan and Lynn seem to be outwardly ambitious and hardworking, they feel that they are merely distracting themselves from their fate, “marking time” in order to distract from the “terror” of their condition (37). They don’t initially have an alternative explanation for their high achievement and hard work other than to think of it as something they don’t fully understand about themselves, a reaction to the deep despondency they feel. They seem resigned to their future, in which they will, at best, end up in a squalid institutional setting, mentally shut off from the world around them by their condition and surrounded by people who don’t know how to care for them. This future seems inevitable and bleak, and they often contemplate suicide.

One reason for this is that their caregivers have reinforced the absolutes through which they see their condition. We might certainly believe that the people who raised Lynn and Alan want what’s best for them. Unfortunately, their motivations unintentionally reinforce these characters’ cynicism. Lynn’s parents, for example, might be able to relate to Lynn by virtue of also being DGDs; however, they are motivated by fear of the deterioration of the condition. Consequently, they unintentionally reinforce the sense of terror Lynn lives with when they force her to visit a DGD ward to see what happens to out-of-control DGDs (35). Alan’s grandparents, meanwhile, who raised Alan after his mother began to drift when he was three, might care for their grandson, but they also seem motivated by guilt, as Naomi’s mother (Alan’s grandmother) took the cure for cancer that led to the DGD condition in Naomi and Alan (55). We can infer that they ultimately struggle to relate to him.

Until they encounter Beatrice, neither has had an effective role model, which has ultimately meant that they have been defined by and defined themselves by the worst qualities of their condition. However, Beatrice provides an optimistic outlook. Lynn learns that she might not succumb to the condition as early as she had thought, as Beatrice, also a double DGD woman, appears to be in her sixties (47). Alan, who remains extremely apprehensive even at the end of the story, still discovers that he can make meaningful contributions as a physician even once he succumbs to the condition. Up until this point, he had, like many DGDs, intensely followed a passion in a way that he could not fully understand. In fact, when asked by Lynn if he thought he could make important contributions to learning more about DGDs, he flatly says that he could not (43). Now, however, Beatrice has informed him that uncontrolled DGDs are still able to do meaningful work. Even so, it is important to note that he hasn’t yet witnessed that firsthand, which largely accounts for his apprehension.

Central to Alan and Lynn’s interactions with Beatrice are profound questions about Self-Determination and Individual Responsibility. In that sense, the theme of Illness, Marginalization, and Institutionalization provides a mechanism for highlighting these questions, and Alan and Beatrice provide foils for Lynn. Initially, Alan’s and Lynn’s futures seem approximately the same. They are both double DGDs and consequently believe they are likely to succumb to the condition sooner than most. Lynn even speculates that Alan will not get into medical school because he is a double DGD (43). After their interaction with Beatrice, and the revelations about Lynn’s unique abilities as a double DGD woman, their trajectories split. The way this split is understood by the two characters reflects a very different understanding of how to exercise free will. Lynn reflects, “You have a choice […] I don’t. If she’s right…how could I not wind up running a retreat?” (67).

Lynn has discovered that her future is more open-ended than she had ever thought possible and that Beatrice, and not the out-of-control DGD she saw at the ward when she was 15, is a more accurate “temporal mirror” (50), one of the many symbols that resonate throughout the story. Despite her freedom, she now understands that it is possible to make a difference for other DGDs and that she specifically can play an important role in doing so. Her cynicism and sense of impending doom are no longer at the forefront of her mind, and, for the first time, she is optimistic about not only her future but also the future of other DGDs.

Meanwhile, Alan is still destined to deteriorate since the best he can hope for, from his perspective, is to be a “drone” in a bee colony in which Lynn plays “queen bee” (64). There is, therefore, some cruel irony in Lynn’s claim that Alan has a choice but she doesn’t. Alan’s choices are grim. He can choose to stay with Lynn, recognizing that eventually he will become someone who doesn’t have any free will. If he leaves her, his options are even worse. He could expect to deteriorate into a dissociative state of self-mutilation at a typical institution, or he could take his own life before that becomes possible. To some extent, the position Alan finds himself in might suggest that he has little free will even now, considering that he has been drawn to Lynn because of her abilities. Lynn herself seems to acknowledge this when she says to Beatrice, “He never really had a chance, did he?” Beatrice responds, “That’s up to you. You can keep him or drive him away” (68). Beatrice and Lynn’s interaction ultimately suggests that Alan’s choice is not really his, but Lynn’s.

Certainly, the main characters, even Beatrice, don’t fully understand themselves, so free will cannot mean making unconstrained choices in a world that they fully understand. Even where choices can be clearly said to exist, they always come with consequences with which the characters must reconcile themselves. Moreover, the DGD condition is a stand in for the reality that we must all come to face. We don’t necessarily get to choose what we are good at, according to Butler, just as the DGDs don’t necessarily have much say in what they focus on. In addition, we all must come to terms with our mortality sooner or later. Otherwise, we might be inclined to suffer in a cynical world of absolutes, just as Alan and Lynn do before they meet Beatrice. Free will resides, Butler seems to suggest, in our willingness to leverage our talents to support the communities we serve, which folds into the final theme of Human Nature and Social Structure.