Salon: Stories don’t need morals or messages.
“The weakness of this approach to fiction should be obvious: If what you really want is a set of fortifying maxims, why bother with stories about feckless romances or foolish kings? Why not just go straight to the self-help section — the secular equivalent of the sermon — as so many American readers already do?” As a character in John Fowles The Magus expresses (and I paraphrase), why sit through a couple of hundred pages of dreck for one threadbare moral? Why not read autobiographies instead and find out how real people accomplished great things?
It’s a question I ask myself over and over and over again.
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