Atticus Finch or the disappointment

Abstract

This essay on disappointment, taking “essay” in Montaigne’s sense, get inspired by reading Javier de Lucas’s book Nosotros que quisimos tanto a Atticus Finch, published in 2020 (§ 1). Then a brief exploration of the concept of disappointment is made, trying to differentiate it indicatively from similar notions, such as wising up, disillusionment o disenchantment (§ 2). Subsequently, the main forms in which disappointment appears are analyzed: material disappointments, with special reference to consumer disappointments (§ 3); ideological disappointments, with a review of the disappointment of democracy in the Greek classics, that of the revolutions of contemporary times and the more recent disappointment of progress (§ 4); and personal disappointments, which are exemplified in some detail in the figures of Socrates, Jesus Christ, Eichmann and Jefferson (§ 5). Section 6 deals with the peculiar disappointment of a fictional character, Atticus Finch, and Section 7, on the learning of disappointment, attempts to summarize the previous material, also proposing some relevant differences between the different forms of disappointment.