A nice book with which freshness into philosophical inquiry is brought in with the help of some pretty nonacademic language features and phrases. :)
Rowlands interestingly defines modernity as a tendency in all of us to swing towards some pretty conflicting life philosophies, namely: individualism, relativism and voluntarism. So basically we are pretty screwed up.
Buffy is the first to be examined. And he defines her rightfully as a pre-modern girl (with her inability to avoid the obligation of being the slayer) living in a modern world.
This is made even more obvious by her existential counterparts, the vampires whose lives are "light" (read Milan Kundera, "The incredible lightness of being") and no obligations bind them (because our consciousness is what allows us to act and choose and it lies outside the natural order and therefore also avoids the realm of obligation, as Sartre supports).
The next point that Rowlands puts forth is something that I have argued before. It concerns the positive nature of death and the mutually-defining phenomenon of life and death, the infinite made finite by the finite.
Thus, death is Buffy's gift as it is all of our's as it allows us to permanently become our actions by stopping the process of becoming and be fixed and for the first time anything.
Thus our actions, Rowland(as I do) asserts, does have bearing and that is why obligations should bind as we owe it to ourselves to leave positive legacies behind.
Then of course the problem is that modernity, with the help of relativism makes everything "small" and very little of everything in life is left "big". So it is tougher on us on the surface to make significance and meaning to our lives as relativism deludes us into believing that everything and every value is not fixed.
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