Once upon a time, and this was a very long time ago, when the world was a great big story book with a great many stories and wonderful pictures filling up myriad pages and where each story would bring about feelings of wonder, fear, astonishment, sadness, pity, disgust, and much more, lived our hero. Now, was our hero a good person or a villainous scallywag or someone in between both of these quintessential characters that make up many a good story? I leave it to you to decide.
Yes, that’s the beauty of a good story. It allows you to decide. A story is a work of passion. A good story in its own turn searches for a reader who will appreciate and take delight in each of the contours that make up its animated canvas. Like Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist play, ‘Six characters in search of an author’, every story also looks for and waits for its reader, like a Juliet waiting for her Romeo to show up and take in the ethereal beauty that unfolds in her countenance that he will behold. A story can be developed with a mix of emotions illuminating the human condition, through the pages that invite the reader to take a seat in the amphitheatre of its arena, where it will perform its magic and hold you captive, very often for the rest of your life.
Every story makes us think. Every story brings about a vortex of emotions and makes us take sides within its magical allure. Stories draw you in and compel you to reflect on the narrative, get aggrieved with characters if they behave in a way that challenges your personal values, experience joy if something good happens to a character whom you believe ‘deserves it’, and vice versa. You will laugh at the comedy of a situation that is narrated or get disgusted with a thing or person that, according to you, demeans the human condition. You will also shed a tear or two and think about it deep into the night if a character meets a tragic end because she may not have ‘deserved that to happen to her’. You will reflect on the hardness of the flaws that make up man’s existential situation and sigh at the unfairness of it all. You may also find personal triumph in a story where good people get their happy rewards and the bad ones get their due comeuppance.
You may even want to put yourself in the jacket or gown of a character that you feel strongly for, and act out your response differently and victoriously. “Why couldn’t she just have done this?”, you may mutter to yourself in outrage. Can there be a reversal? A tragic situation needs to be rescued from the oppressor, be it a person or a situation leading to this tragic condition, you may contend indignantly. “If only”, you may sigh, for life can be so unfair at times and tragic narratives where bad things happen to good people bring forth feelings of fear and pity to grapple with in your personal reflections.
Moving on, you may even gasp out loud when there is a sudden twist in the tale, like the sting from a mamba. The narrative has now, very suddenly, taken a course that you didn’t imagine it would, and this can leave you astonished. Some storytellers do this very well, leaving you at the edge of your reading chair, holding on excitedly to the book or the chair’s arm as you eagerly read on. At times, you may even want the comfort of a linear narrative, one which is predictable but, if told well, can be an equally agreeable experience. A story like this one fits into a happy place with no hairpin twists and turns. One that ends happily ever after where the good are rewarded and the bad are punished.
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