When I was in middle school and we started reading novels in class, I started to see a pattern: every single book we read was sad. "Sad" could range anywhere from To Kill a Mockingbird, which features some pretty depressing death scenes, to Elie Wiesel's Night, which tells the story of the Holocaust. Each book was serious, depressing, or - officially speaking - tragic.
I got pretty upset about this. I had started to realize that many scholars of English literature only considered serious works to be "good" while funny books weren't even worth discussion, and that didn't sound right to me at all. Why did a book have to make you sad in order to be meaningful?
I think that comedies are just as important to culture as tragedies. Stories that make us laugh or make us satisfied are perhaps even more powerful than stories that make us cry. The power lies within the author's ability to make the reader laugh at surprising things, or be satisfied by an ending that they didn't expect.
In order for a story to teach you something, it has to end in a way that you can't see coming. The easiest way to do this is to create a tragic ending, because there are infinite ways to ruin your characters' lives. But creating an ending that satisfies the reader in a way they didn't think could satisfy them can teach them even more about themselves, and the world, and all the range of emotions within it.
You make a valid argument, and I agree with you that comedy can be a meaningful art form, but I also think that people learn immensely from tragedies.
ReplyDeleteI would argue with you on the merit of a tragedy, as you seem to disregard tragedy as a valid form of literature. I'm not sure if I would call Elie Wiesel's "Night" a tragedy, however, as the main character survived the Holocaust, even though he did suffer through the atrocities of WWII, and I think that Wiesel's story is one that people need to read.