Moral Dilemmas
Truby and McKee both point to moral dilemmas as the key to successful fiction. McKee points out that our more relativist society makes developing believable moral dilemmas more difficult. When more people believed in absolutes, crafting moral dilemmas in fiction was more straightforward.
Now, it seems, there is the gray morality of everyday life, in which the problems facing lovers (as an example) aren’t the absolutes of a morality in which fathers can withhold permission for lovers to marry, and when sex divorced from marriage nearly always led to disastrous consequences. Rather, in an era when premarital sex is nearly a given and there are few stigma attached to marrying outside of one’s religion or class, the moral dilemmas seem smaller, the distinctions between right and wrong more subtle. Or more orbitrary.
So how do writers go about setting up moral dilemmas that satisfy the modern audience? It’s a question I struggle with as I set up the desires and actions of my characters.
On one hand, the more subtle dilemmas appeal. They’re less melodramatic; they’re more “realistic.” On the other hand, they sometimes seem inconsequential, self-indulgent. The kind of problems reserved for the privileged in time and place. They don’t seem essential enough, life-and-death enough.
In fiction at least, the place for absolutes, for extreme moral choices, seems to be in alternate realities. From Harry Potter to Twilight to the most cutting edge science fiction, alternate realities offer the opportunity for the kinds of grand moral choices we find so captivating and unforgetable in Shakespeare, in Dickens.
Even some of the modern literary fiction that most moves readers has a close link to absolute morality. I’m thinking of Sophie’s Choice and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, both of which are concerned with life-and-death choices, and draw moral depth from their characters’ proximity to the Holocaust. Or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which draws its moral dilemmas from the dark heart of American slavery.
Which do you, as a reader, prefer? The more subtle moral choices characters face in some modern literary fiction, or the life-and-death choices of writing done in times of less relative morality? Why? Leave your thoughts in comments.