Dragonfly: Not-so-saintly Ghosts

Towards the end of Dragonfly in Amber, we learn a thing or two about ghosts.  As she marvels over Alex Randall's ability to cling to life, Claire-as-narrator (because I think her voice shifts throughout the novels) ruminates on what ghosts are, no longer doubting their reality:

I thought that was perhaps how some ghosts were made; where a will and a purpose had survived, heedless of the frail flesh that fell by the wayside, unable to sustain life long enough.  I didn't much want to be haunted by Alex Randall; that, among other reasons, was why I had made Jamie come with me today. (858)

Although it is peopled with more or less saintly ghosts from beginning to end, the one ghost that haunts the whole Outlander series for me is the ghost--presumably Jamie, though we don't know him at that point in the narrative--whom Frank Randall sees gazing with consternation at Claire's 20th Century window at the beginning of Outlander.

About 30 pages later, the novel evokes the bond between Jamie and Claire--a timeless bond (appropriately enough)--in Jamie's declaration that (once again evoking The Princess Bride), "death cannot stop true love--it can only delay it a little":

"I will find you," he whispered in my ear.  "I promise.  If I must endure two hundred years of purgatory, two hundred years without you--then that is my punishment, which I have earned for my crimes.  For I have lied, and killed, and stolen; betrayed and broken trust.  But there is one thing that shall lie in the balance.  When I shall stand before God, I shall have one thing to say, to weigh against the rest."
     His voice dropped, nearly to a whisper, and his arms tightened around me.
     "Lord, ye gave me a rare woman, and God! I loved her well." (889)

Though final judgment before God is evoked, there is something a little unholy, both in the will of Alex Randall and that of Jamie--unholy, but also admirable from a very worldly, human perspective, since it is human love that leads the soul to resist eternal rest, and human love itself is presumed to have some redeeming power.  (The idea of the redemptive power of human love could lead me on a whole different tangent, about Plato's Symposium and the "ladder of love"...)

A few pages later, as Claire and Jamie consummate their leave-taking:

Neither of us could finish the vow, "so long as we both shall live," but the unspoken words hung aching between us.  Finally he smiled crookedly.
    "Longer than that," he said firmly, and pulled me to him once more. (892)

Between the two passages, the reader can begin to piece together the mystery of Jamie's ghost:  his will and his purpose are bound to Claire, and she no longer exists in his time.  Jamie cannot time travel in body--only as a ghost.

Here I am reminded of another ghost story--The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which is both a 1947 classic film with Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney, and a 1945 novel by R. A. Dick.  The protagonist does not fall in love with the ghost until he is a ghost, and the film and novel versions of Mrs. Muir present very different versions of the afterlife, with the novel permitting a movement of ghosts back-and-forth between a heaven-like place and the material, human world, and the film omitting the vision of heaven.  However, the connection of soul to earth because of the will and unfinished purpose is a commonality with Outlander, and the idea of eternal (human) love that transcends the flesh is another.  In the film, the eternal nature of love is particularly poignant and attractive, and though the differences are too many to number, the vision of Jamie as a ghost with unfulfilled purpose, refusing eternal rest and gazing on the woman whom he loves and with whom he cannot be joined, evokes the ghostly Captain Gregg for me.