The Anatomy of Story (21 page)

The moral argument is repeated more intensely and in shorter form in the last quarter of the story: Achilles begins justified in his wrath at his second opponent, Hector, but then declines morally when his anger

makes him desecrate Hector's body by dragging it around the camp. Finally, Hector's father, Priam, pleads for the return of his son's body. Achilles has a second, much deeper self-revelation about the need for compassion over vengeance, and he decides to let Priam take the body so it can receive a proper burial.

VARIANTS OF MORAL ARGUMENT

The basic strategy of moral argument has a number of variants, depending on the story form, the particular story, and the individual writer. You may find that more than one kind of moral argument is useful for your story, though, as we shall see, combining forms is risky.

1. Good Versus Bad

In this lowest variation of moral argument, the hero remains good and the opponent bad throughout. This approach is especially common in myth stories, action stories, and melodramas, which are simple moral tales with easily recognizable characters. The sequence goes like this:

■ The hero has psychological weaknesses but is essentially good.

■
His opponent is morally flawed and may even be evil (inherently immoral).

■
In the competition for the goal, the hero makes mistakes but does not act immorally.

■ The opponent, on the other hand, executes a number of immoral actions.

■ The hero wins the goal simply because he is good. In effect, the two sides of the moral ledger are added up, and the good hero wins the "game" of life.

Examples of good-versus-bad moral argument are
The Matrix, City Slickers, Field of Dreams, Crocodile Dundee, Dances with Wolves, The Blues Brothers, Star Wars, Forrest Gump, My Darling Clementine, Places in the Heart, The Terminator, The Fugitive, Last of the Mohicans, Shane,
and
The Wizard ofOz.

2. Tragedy

Tragedy takes the basic strategy of moral argument and twists it at the end-points. You give the hero a fatal character flaw at the beginning and a self-revelation that comes too late near the end. The sequence works like this:

The community is in trouble.

The hero has great potential but also a great flaw.

The hero enters into deep conflict with a powerful or capable

opponent.

The hero is obsessed with winning and will perform a number of questionable or immoral acts to do so.

The conflict and competition highlight the hero's flaw and show him getting worse.

The hero gains a self-revelation, but it comes too late to avoid destruction.

The key to this strategy is heightening the sense of the hero's might-have-been and lost potential while also showing that the hero's actions are his responsibility. The sense of might-have-been is the single most important element for getting audience sympathy, while the fatal character flaw makes the hero responsible and keeps him from becoming a victim. The audience feels sadness at the lost potential, made more acute by the hero's having gained his great insight mere minutes after it could have saved him. But even though he has died or fallen, the audience is left with a deep sense of inspiration from the hero's moral as well as emotional success.

Notice also that this strategy represents a crucial shift from classic Greek drama. The fall of the hero is not the inevitable result of large impersonal forces but rather the consequence of the hero's own choices.

Classic tragedies include
Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, The Seven Samurai, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Nixon, The Thomas Crown Affair
(the original),
The Age of Innocence, Wuthering Heights, Vertigo, Amadeus, Le Morte dArthur, American Beauty, Touch of Evil,
and
Citizen Kane.

Wuthering Heights

(novel by Emily Bronte, 1847, screenplay by Charles Mac Arthur and

Ben Hecht, 1939)

Wuthering Heights
is a love story written as a classic tragedy. The moral argument follows a number of strands in which characters commit devastating acts on one another. And using the tragic strategy, the characters are all broken by a terrible sense of responsibility for what they've done.

Cathy, the hero, is not just a lovelorn girl passively acted on by a man. She is a woman who has a great love, a love that can only be "found in heaven," and she freely gives it up for a man of wealth and comfort. Initially, she is in love with Heathcliff and he with her, but she won't live with him as a poor beggar. She wants "dancing and singing in a pretty world."

When she returns from her stay at Edgar Linton's mansion, Heathcliff, her main opponent, criticizes her by demanding to know why she stayed so long. She defends herself by replying that she was having a wonderful time among human beings. She further hurts Heathcliff by ordering him to bathe so she won't be ashamed of him in front of a guest (Edgar).

Cathy immediately recovers from her moral fall in the next moment when Edgar asks Cathy how she can tolerate having Heathcliff under her roof. She flares in anger, saying Heathcliff was her friend long before Edgar was and telling him he must speak well of Heathcliff or leave. When Edgar goes, Cathy tears off her pretty clothes, runs to the crag where Heathcliff is waiting, and asks his forgiveness.

Bronte's moral argument through Cathy reaches its apex when Cathy tells her servant Nellie that she will marry Edgar while Heathcliff secretly listens in the next room. Now it is Nellie, the ally, who leads the criticism. She asks Cathy why she loves Edgar, and Cathy replies that it's because he's handsome and pleasant and will be rich someday. When Nellie asks about Heathcliff, Cathy says it would degrade her to marry him.

Bronte matches this strong moral argument in the dialogue with a brilliant and highly emotional plot beat. Devastated, Heathcliff leaves, but only Nellie can see that. In the next breath, Cathy flips and says she doesn't belong with Edgar. She dreamed that she was thrown out of heaven onto the heath, and she sobbed with joy. She says she only thinks of Heathcliff, but he seems to take pleasure in being cruel. Yet he is more herself than she is. Their souls are the same. In a stunning self-revelation, she says, "I
am
Heathciff." When she discovers that Heathcliff was listening up to the point where she said it would degrade her to marry him, Cathy rushes out into the storm, screaming out her love. But it is too late.

At this point, Bronte makes a radical change in tragic moral argument: she essentially reverses heroes and gives Heathcliff the lead. Heath-cliff returns and attacks ruthlessly, as a love made in heaven must when it has been scorned for something so pedestrian.

Heathcliff is a rebel who, like Achilles, is initially right in his revenge against injustice. Bronte uses the "return of the man" technique when Heathcliff comes back, Monte Cristo style, wealthy and sophisticated. The audience feels tremendous triumph in these scenes, and they don't even need to see how the character has made such a huge transformation. The man is back, finally armed as everyone has dreamed of being armed in a similar situation. The audience feels "It could be done—I could have done it," followed by "Now I will take my sweet revenge."

With the audience firmly on Heathcliff's side, Bronte reverses the moral argument by having Heathcliff go too far. Even losing such a love in so unjust a manner does not allow you to marry the sister and sister-in-law of your enemies just to pay them back. To see the innocent love that Edgar's sister, Isabella, has on her face as she walks into Heathcliff's trap is a heartbreaking moment. It is what great moral argument in storytelling is all about.

These moments between Cathy and Heathcliff are common-man versions of kings and queens at war. This is Lear raging on the moors. What makes the concept of the love made in heaven so believable is the ferocity of the immoral attacks that these two make on one another. This is pure savagery, and they do it
because
of the extreme love they have for each other.

At the end of the film adaptation, Heathcliff attacks Cathy one more time, and it is a justifiable attack, even though she is on her deathbed. He won't comfort her. His tears curse her. She begs him not to break her heart. But he says she broke it. "What right did you have to throw love away for the poor fancy thing you felt for him?" Nothing in the world could have separated them. You did that, he says, by wandering off like a greedy child. Cathy begs his forgiveness, and they kiss.

In the book, Heathcliff goes too far again, this time way beyond the pale, when he tries to destroy the Linton line. That's why this section was cut in the classic film, a work in many ways superior to the novel as a piece of storytelling. As Bronte wrote it, from this point of attack on, the organic story between Cathy and Heathcliff is essentially over, and Heath-cliff's actions, though emotionally effective, are simply overkill.

King Lear

(by William Shakespeare, 1605)
In
King Lear,
Shakespeare gives a more nuanced moral argument than is found in most classic tragedy. The key to his technique is the creation of two "heroes": the main character, Lear, and the subplot character, Gloucester. Both Lear and Gloucester start with moral flaws, and both decline over the course of the story, gain moral self-revelations, and die. But we find no sense of the noble death that we see in, say,
Hamlet.
There is no feeling that order has been restored to the world, that all will be well again.

Instead Shakespeare points toward the basic immorality of humans and the amorality of the natural world. First, he has his two leads, Lear and Gloucester, make the same moral mistakes and die pitilessly. One king having a tragic fall is inspiring. Two shows a pattern of moral blindness that feels endemic to the human race.

Second, Shakespeare kills off Cordelia, the one morally good character in the play, and does so in an especially cruel way. It is true that Edgar, a good but initially foolish man, has defeated his bad brother and Lear's two nasty daughters. But in the overwhelming devastation, we are left with only a sliver of the value of living a good life. Edgar says, in the play's famous last line, "We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long." In other words, in a world of immoral humans, one man's immense suffering has let him live deeply, but at tremendous cost. For later Shakespeare, that's about as much nobility as you can expect from the human race.

3. Pathos

Pathos is a moral argument that reduces the tragic hero to an everyman and appeals to the audience by showing the beauty of endurance, lost causes, and the doomed man. The main character doesn't get a self-revelation too

late. He isn't capable of one. But he keeps lighting all the way to the end. The moral argument works like this:

■ The hero has a set of beliefs and values that have atrophied. They are out-of-date or rigid.

■ The hero has a moral need; he is not just a victim.

■
His goal is beyond his grasp, but he doesn't know it.

■ His opponent is far too powerful for him and may be a system or a set of forces that the hero cannot comprehend. This opposition is not evil. It is simply impersonal or uncaring and very powerful.

■ The hero takes immoral steps to win and refuses to heed any warnings or criticism from his allies.

■ The hero fails to win the goal. The opponent wins an overwhelming victory, but the audience senses that this was not a fair fight.

■ The hero ends in despair: he is a broken man with no self-revelation and dies of heartbreak, or—and this is what his moral decision has been reduced to—he takes his own life.

■
The audience feels a deep sense of injustice in the world and sadness at the death of the little man who had no idea what hit him. But they also feel a deep admiration for the beautiful failure, the good fight, and the hero's refusal to admit defeat.

The moral argument of pathos is found in
Don Quixote, A Streetcar Named Desire,
many Japanese films such as
Ikiru (To Live), Death of a Salesman, Hedda Gabler, The Conversation, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Falling Down, M, The Apu Trilogy, Madame Bovary, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Cherry Orchard, Dog Day Afternoon,
and
Cinema Paradiso.

4. Satire and Irony

Satire and irony are not the same, but they commonly go together. Satire is the comedy of
beliefs,
especially those on which an entire society is based. Irony is a form of story
logic
in which a character gets the opposite of what he wants and takes action to get. When it's used over an entire story and not just for a moment, irony is a grand pattern that connects all actions in the story and expresses a philosophy of how the world works.

Irony also has a bemused tone that encourages the audience to laugh at the relative incompetence of the characters.