Commentary on Excerpt I

In Attitudes Toward History (1938:41-2), Burke suggests that,

The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility which underlies great tragedy.

Having assembled and discussed the relevant component parts of the story, the interactants in this case study are on their way to co-constructing just such a judgment, one that is particularly fitting for a human comedy of great forensic complexity (Burke, 1938). Frank has been "stupid," says one. "Insensitive," suggests another. "Inconsiderate," is Laura's pronounced judgment. Frank himself admits to having acted impulsively. If "guilty" at all, then, it is of a lesser charge than knowingly and deliberately causing harm to Laura. These judgments are also those we should expect of good friends. They are critical but also supportive. They reflect in their judgments a hermeneutics of suspicion balanced by a hermeneutics of collaboration.

But this is not the end of the story. For Frank's own judgment of impulsivity to be the fitting, final judgment in this case, Frank's claim to having made a "spur-of-the-moment" decision has to be narratively coherent. But, alas, Frank cannot sustain that claim about what he has "done" in the face of Laura's questioning. At best he can say of an earlier acknowledgment of premeditation that he had been "exaggerating." This confession raises anew the credibility of his earlier account. And so the conversation continues, inconclusively but not unprofitably, the component parts still subject, as White says, to reconstitution and reinterpretation.