Conclusion: Be Reasonable

Mann’s response to life under oppression, his self-effacing wisdom and act of ultimate personal forfeiture, proves doubly insightful: his response helps to interrogate the social politics prevailing in interwar Mississippi; his response helps to offset the abstractions philosophers apply when devising trolley problems. Thus, while trolley problems help to analyze the manner in which literary works raise questions concerning the basic ethical nature of social structures, interhuman dependencies, and personal choices, literature can improve the credibility of philosophical trolley problems by readmitting contextual issues such as ethnicity. Faced with his own trolley problem, which left him the choice between killing his art or letting the American within him die, Wright decamped to France—and whatever the reasons behind his death, Wright thereby retained his dignity.