There have been times in literary history when writers steered clear of the great moral issues, but not completely, and never for long. The 18th century (Johnson, Gray, Cowper) had no problem telling people how to think and behave. The Romantics made the egotistical sublime, though Wordsworth’s self was large enough for everyone. The Victorians opened things up again, as did T. S. Eliot a little later, with big pronouncements about the state of the world. Literature took to the confessional in the 1960s, when personal demons took over for universal evils. Yet while Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath shrank subject matter to the size of Czar Lepke and Daddy, we still could see the Us in Them. One might say that the shadow of the Big Bad Bomb made honor, heroism and the rest beside the point. But “Invisible Man” and “Doctor Zhivago” appeared while we were ducking and covering, suggesting that dealing with big themes in literature depends less on eras than on individual inclination.

So, let us speak of Fitzgerald, and of Jay Gatsby, who stood straight and sober in the drunken Twenties, and who, nutty as his yearnings may have been, really was great. And this was not because he was willing to take the wheel and the rap for the moral nitwit, Daisy. That was more gallantry than heroism. No. Gatsby showed his splendid colors in a quieter gesture, when he decided to stand watch outside Daisy’s house after the hit and run, thinking to protect her from Tom — dear Daisy, who at that same moment was sitting across from Tom, over a plate of cold fried chicken, the two of them in the “natural intimacy” of their eternal conspiracy. Behold Gatsby, the hero of the useless vigil. Small wonder Nick does not understand when Gatsby dismisses whatever passed for love between Tom and Daisy as “just personal.” The great Gatsby lives above the merely personal. Could there be any doubt that he was “worth the whole damn bunch put together”?

To live above the merely personal does not require plying oars against colossal currents, either. “Harold and the Purple Crayon” is a great little book and deals with its own verities — the world is not in your control; courage begins at free fall; the best path is not the straight path. The lessons of the “Odyssey,” minus the sex. Harold draws his dream in crayon and then wants to go home, to his window, which has been there all along. The key to his destiny is that window, which is something to look out of, away from himself. At no time is Harold self-­conscious, self-pitying or self-congratulatory. He knows how to draw a life, and how to live.

Let us also speak of Dickens, who is often undervalued because he hits the eternal verities on the nose. Sure, we cannot help being aware of his in-your-face morality, yet we are moved by it nonetheless, because, tossing sophistication to the wind, we wish to see the just rewarded and the unjust punished. No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil. Both Miss Havisham and Mrs. Macbeth probably would have preferred to behave themselves.