Narrative Analysis Brief Thoughts

[unspeakablehorror]

One thing that I think good narrative analysis always comes down to is this: not just what good or bad things are happening (no matter how favorable or horrific) to characters or what good or bad things they do, but how that fits into a coherent commentary on the real world.  If someone is going to argue ethics regarding fictional characters, they need to look at the bigger picture rather than just taking the things in-narrative at face value.  This goes for both direct analysis like 'X happened to Y and X in real life is bad therefore Y is being oppressed in the story and this has real-life implications for oppression' and analysis like 'well the author said it's good that X happened to Y, so obviously it's good'.  In both of these cases, I ask the questions 'Who are these people viewing Y as' and how does the depiction of Y in the story line up (or not) with the real-life version of Y'.  If the answer requires twisting fictional Y into something unrecognizable to reflect real-life Y, then that's a problem (eg. claiming some group X represents black people as a whole, but group X is in a position of institutional power in the story).  If real-life Y is often falsely claiming X or some X-equivalent is happening to them (eg. white people claiming racism against themselves), then that also calls into question the value of the interpretation if the events of the text are taken at face value. Of course there often will not be a 1:1 correspondence of fictional texts to reality, and competing interpretations CAN both make sense, but there's a real difference between interpretations that show a background and understanding of actual history and current events and give the details on where they think these connections can be made and ones that implicitly rely on logic like 'that's the good guy so it's automatically more moral to favor them'.