She has more often seemed motivated by duty than desire.
But by senior year, Gerta felt torn between duty and desire.
About 31,000 Iraqi Civil Defense Corps troops have been on duty; the desired total is 40,000.
And the conflict between duty and desire, which is the central theme of the play, is still a moral problem.
Similarly, traditional philosophy expressed the ascetic ideal when it privileged soul over body, mind over senses, duty over desire, reality over appearance, the timeless over the temporal.
The frequent use of a split screen — sometimes effective, sometimes distracting — emphasizes the isolation of the characters, even as they are connected by blood, duty and desire.
What Michael Mercer offers, at times pathetically, is an eagerness for duty, a desire to be used, to be of use.
It seems to me about the conflict between duty and desire, reason and imagination and the invasion of the daily world by demonic, troll-like forces.
At one point, she claims not to have "felt like a woman in ten years"; the couple's "chemistry," as critics like to call it, is based on duty, not desire.
Another novel set on campus was My Education by Susan Choi, author of American Woman (2003) and A Person of Interest (2008); it concerned young love and sexuality but was less interested in the politics of teacher-student and same-sex relationships than in the tensions between duty and desire.
