"Grim Fiction"

     

A few years back a student of mine asked me why the classic books of fiction were so depressing. Why were they filled with so much hardship and suffering. There is no doubt that classic novels like The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and even Huck Finn have a lot of grimness to them. So do plays, and short stories. There are several good reasons why classic works of fiction are built around hardship and suffering.

          The first reason for fictional suffering is that there is more drama in suffering than in happy moments. Suffering heightens the reader’s interest. What would capture your attention more reading about someone’s nice day at work or seeing whether or not the Joad family can survive the great depression? If you ask someone how their day was and they say it was a good day you think well that’s nice but if they say it was an awful day, you want to know why. In the novel, Huck Finn, Huck’s running away with the fugitive slave Jim puts them both in constant, imminent danger and that is more interesting to read than if Huck were running away with a childhood friend.

          The second reason why there is grimness and suffering in fiction is because readers place themselves in the characters shoes and wonder how they would/will handle life’s difficulties. I don’t wonder how I would handle a nice birthday party because I have, but how would I handle the sudden death of my closest sister, or handle being thrust into an economic depression and instant poverty? What would I do? If I started to have a nervous breakdown like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye where would I go, who would I turn to? We don’t always identify with any one particular character’s suffering or hardship but we do identify with hardship and suffering in general.

          The final reason why there is so much suffering and grimness in fiction is because it builds tension that will keep the reader reading. The reader wants to know how the character(s) troubles will turn out so they read to the end. Will Gatsby, in the Great Gatsby, get the love of his life , will Jim, in Huck Finn, get his family back, will the Joad family, in The Grapes of Wrath, find a new safe home. We want to know. The happier stories just don’t build up the tension and therefore the desire to finish reading the story nearly as well.

          When my student asked me why the classic books had so much hardship and depression in them I said in a flippant way, “So you’ll read them”. I was being humorous but it’s also true. We all have happy moments and difficult moments. It’s the difficult moments that shape us, define us and help us grow. That’s what the great writers write about.