Free Will and Determinism

Throughout Double Blind, St. Aubyn positions the tension between free will and determinism as a central struggle for several of his characters. Perhaps most prominently, Olivia rejects the notion that her biological parents (with whom she had almost no contact as a child) played a primary role in determining the nature of her character. In this way, Olivia dismisses genetic fundamentalism. Much of her academic work seeks to buttress this same viewpoint. She discusses an experiment in which mice were electrocuted when exposed to a certain smell; an aversion to this smell continued for several generations, even though “it was impossible for a learnt aversive response to write itself the DNA” (25). For Olivia, this represents the “kind of challenge to the conventional view of inheritance that made epigenetics such an exhilarating field” (25). The “conventional view of inheritance,” which supposes that human nature is...