Victoria Glendinning has noted that the “Ur-story” of Trollope’s novels consists of a romantic triangle where a protagonist is romantically committed to one character, yet becomes attracted to another character and hence delays the fulfillment of the first relationship. Trollope’s use of this form is not accidental: his novels return repeatedly and reflectively to agents who act against their own best judgment. Characters like Phineas Finn, who act on impulses they wish they did not have and for reasons with which they themselves disagree, demonstrate the centrality of the philosophical problem of akrasia or “weakness of the will” to Trollope’s thought, and thus make clear the extent to which Trollope’s use of the form of the romantic triangle is a tool for the analysis of a problem in moral psychology.
1SI1030 Weakness of the will and loss of spontaneity(1SI How does hierarchical soft structure create spontaneous activity:Smart dynamics from single macromolecule to human being,The 48th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society of Japan)