Often, I read critiques stating that a certain aspect of a book is bad because it’s normalizing behavior X. This is because it portrays a character engaging in X without facing negative consequences or any moral lesson in the story.
Can’t a story just be a story? Does it always have to be interpreted as an attempt to influence behavior? Unfortunately, in real life, Nazis/pedophiles/puppy killers, etc., often don’t repent and sometimes achieve a happy ending. If this happens in a fictional story, is it bad?
I find this problematic for two reasons. First, it treats the reader as someone incapable of independent critical thinking. It’s reminiscent of when video games/comics were accused of turning young people violent and degenerate. Second, it makes stories overly predictable. You automatically read stories expecting 2-3 plot twists in the final arc, and the villain will be either punished or converted.
by gombahands
11 Comments
Stories can be an system of delivering a message or idea. They can also just be for fun.
Absolutely not.
I think you’re conflating two separate things. On the one hand, there is the idea that stories should convey moral lessons. On the other, there is the idea that art in general plays a role in perpetuating social injustice, political oppression, etc., or not.
The first issue is a problem for art. The second is a problem for politics.
They may not “convey moral lessons” but every single book contains and reflects moral attitudes. These are demonstrated through the contents of the book themselves. How characters treat each other, how they react to circumstances, how other characters react to those characters, what the exposition says about the characters/setting/events of the book, etc. These all have a moral weight to them.
Every single word in a book was put there by the author, and these words are the reflection of the author’s thoughts – about morals, politics, ethics, etc. They may not be well considered thoughts or deep thoughts or good thoughts, but they are there in the book. It is through “critical thinking” we as readers may examine those ideas and extract what normative statements the book is making, and make a judgment about whether those are good or bad.
To do that to all fiction would be a really boring and limiting disservice. Stories are so much more complicated and that, and I think the purpose is for the reader to stretch their mind, mull it over, do their own analysis, see where they land.
Reading is work. Not spoon feeding.
No. This is a weird criticism that I’ve been seeing applied to many things, not just books.
It’s a big discussion in musical theater. Many [young] viewers don’t understand the concept of a morally ambiguous story or flawed characters. They think every story should have a clear moral.
It is ruining the discourse around many shows and ruining the industry because writers cater to this dumbed down thinking.
It’s very frustrating.
Sometimes it can be just pure vibes nothing else.
It’s very funny. Murakami is the king of setting up morals or ideas then have his characters learn nothing by the end. It’s very interesting to me how authors can just have people do shit and when you finish you’d realize they’d do it again probably
Stories are the primary means through which human beings teach moral lessons. Even “if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” is a story.
That being said, people can disagree about what moral lesson a story teaches (see: any religious text), and of course a story doesn’t _have to_ teach a lesson. But people will find meaning in a story even if it’s not “meant to” teach a lesson. We do that with history.
The problem here isn’t with the stories or the books or the authors. The problem is people who think they have all the answers and pass themselves off as some kind of “professional critic” that deserves an audience. Critics are so often lonely people in search of validation. Just read for yourself and to heck with what the critiques say. Read their opinions if you wish, just don’t take them to hear or as the gospel truth. Reflect a little when you’re done with a book and ask yourself these questions. What’s important is how YOU feel about what happens in a book, not what some windy whiner says about it. Novels are not Aesop Fables and shouldn’t be expected to follow that format. Not everything you see/read/hear has to be a lesson.
No not really. But the consumer is going to be left feeling at least some kind of way if there are no karmic balances when they finish a story. I think the stories we have are the ones we have because they’re the ones we receive well. As humans we want the bad guy to not win and we don’t want undeserved punishment for good people. It leaves a bad taste when it happens. I think the problem is a lot of people would call stories that don’t balance the karma bad stories. And there’s also the whole stories are packages for life lessons because the characters in the stories necessarily have things that happen to them.