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The idea is appealing but there is this underlying hypothesis that things that happen to the main chracter can be qualified as true or bad. I wonder what the sh
by toto444 4y ago
The idea is appealing but there is this underlying hypothesis that things that happen to the main chracter can be qualified as true or bad. I wonder what the shape of a detective story would be for instance.
- 867-5309 4y agoa detective story would naturally take the shape of Which Way is Up
- soapdog 4y agoIn many detective stories, the detective is not the main character. They are the point-of-view, but act more like a force of nature passing through the story unchanged while someone else is going through a complex character arc while witnessing the unfolding of the story.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dwringer 4y agoI would argue every story has a vast, seemingly infinite* number of shapes, limited only by our ability to model objectives toward which events can be classified as positive or negative. Still, that doesn't make it a useless method of analysis because we can find objectives that can be applied across stories in a somewhat universal way. Or, authors can simply come up with objectives that they think might be interesting. *I suppose these numbers would be combinatorically constrained by a function of the number of graphemes/phonemes, and not actually infinite, but still huge.
- goto11 4y ago> there is this underlying hypothesis that things that happen to the main chracter can be qualified as true or bad. Vonneguts point is actually the opposite: > In Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is, and we respond to that.