There are definitely questions about which I'm not interested in speculating. These are mostly questions that resolve themselves within the novels, or questions that do not resonate outside of the novels. They are interesting, but there is no need to elaborate. One such question asserts itself in Dragonfly in Amber, in the chapters titled "Untimely Resurrection" and "The Royal Stud": the question of Jamie's vengeance upon Jack Randall, and whether Claire is right to make him postpone that vengeance. It could be that I think Claire is more wrong about preventing Jamie from killing Jack Randall on this particular occasion than she is to make him betray his country and kin to prevent the Battle (and devastation) of Culloden. I'll never tell. But it's also true that Gabaldon brings the matter around very neatly, giving Jamie the ability to reclaim some of his own by determining his own reason for postponing vengeance (and getting in some nice foreshadowing as well). It's a lovely narrative card that she plays, and well worth giving a nod. (See pp. 401-403 in the small, Dell paperback version with the orange cover.) But--it is part of the narrative, and in terms of Jamie's justification, what he does or does not owe Claire, the question of conscience, or anything involving their feelings about other characters, it works itself out, and doesn't really require speculation or further analysis of motivations. I like to leave the characters to themselves, and allow their motivations to emerge through the action of the story rather than through my own suppositions and psychoanalysis. It's why criticism is (or should be) sort of the anti-fan-fiction. (Just for fun, check out Diana Gabaldon's Fan Fiction Policy.)
What is interesting in the maneuverings of Claire to prevent Jamie from killing Jack Randall too soon is (first) that the question is never the morality of the vengeance. That is taken for granted, and I'm glad. Moralistic posturing would do no one any good in this case. Claire's conscience is evoked, rather neatly, to turn the guilt of preventing Frank's birth (indirectly, by the death of Jack Randall) to Claire's decision to abandon Frank for Jamie--at least, that is how Jamie casts Claire's decision not to pass again through the stones: "it's one thing to abandon a man, and another to condemn him to death" (401). Non-birth/prevention of conception is not quite death, but we'll let that go for the moment. Jamie's conscience is never an issue, except insofar as killing always leaves a mark: "I remember the face of every man I've killed, and always will" (400). And that's just fine.
But the deeper implications of the maneuverings leave some room for consideration. If this novel is instrumental to the series, it may well be--first and foremost--the working out of what a time traveler can and can't accomplish with reference to history that gives it it's highest value in the big picture. (I have other considerations of time travel here and here.) The reason I drag God into it in my title is because the question of conscience was right in front of me in the narrative. Brother Anselm and his theology, the moral implications of preventing someone from being born. But a larger question emerges: could anything Jamie and Claire have done prevent the beginning of the bloodline that eventually produces Frank Randall, Claire's husband in the year 1943?
It's something like the question my son asked of his 4th grade teacher at the fourth-rate Catholic school that he went to for most of that year: if Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, would any of us exist? Need I say that the teacher didn't know how to answer the question? I consulted a deacon friend of mine, and came up with the response that our existence in God's plan didn't depend on sin. We simply don't know how things would have worked out without it. There is something tangentially related to this question happening in Perelandra, the second book of C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. An alien world is experiencing its own Creation, and Lewis's Ransom is a spectator and intercessor, preventing the successful temptation of the newly-Created female of the alien species so that the world might emerge without the taint of Original Sin. The idea is--Sin or no Sin, our existence as individuals is part of God's plan.
So is this worldview somehow reflected in Gabaldon's novel? At first glance it may seem not to be. Clearly, it is absent from the Back to the Future movie trilogy--things change, people disappear. But there's nothing about God in those films. Religion is simply not part of the picture(s). By contrast, there's Catholicism all over the place in the Outlander series. You can't get around it, the novels have a Catholic consciousness, whatever their orthodoxy. You might say that it proceeds from what has been called "the Catholic imagination," though I wouldn't quote Andrew Greeley for orthodoxy's sake...
Without saying how, I will say that Frank's bloodline works itself out. It works itself out with Jack Randall alive, but it does so in a way that his survival has precious little to do with the birth. Clever. So does that mean Predestination? I'm not sure. Although there is implied argument between Predestination and Free Will in the novels (especially with reference to Roger Wakefield in some of the later books), there seems to be quite a bit of room for Free Will--or really, would readers enjoy the books so much? But characters' Free Will seems to feed directly into what they know to have been going to happen. (I'm absolutely playing with verb tense there. Too bad I'm not writing in a romance language!) In other words, the characters end up proving their own instrumentality to the events that will unfold--or have unfolded--or will have unfolded. Everything fits neatly into place. Some would consider this as evidence for God in the Outlander worldview--or in its representation of time travel. I think there's evidence, at least, that the man who was Frank Randall was "meant" to exist--which does, in fact, suggest some greater intentionality beyond the machinations of Claire and Jamie.
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