good and bad in literture
... In the production and reception of a narrative, there is often a manichaistic distinction of characters into bad and good characters: the good detective versus the bad criminal, the honest policeman against the corrupted politician, the innocent girl, victim of a dissolute debaucher, etc. This distinction covers a psychological need of the reader, the illusion that the bad is finally punished, and the good rewarded. ... A literary genre, detective stories, is based upon this distinction between good and bad characters. The reader, in the course of the reception, identifies with the good characters. ... The more a good character appears on the stage, the more we identify with him. So dramatists, novelists and scriptwriters focus more often on good heroes than on evil ones. ... We can see better the function of identification in narrative by studying works which fall outside the rule of portraying good characters. A good example is Patrick Süskid’s best seller The Perfume1, where the main character is a negative, wicked person. ... Of particular interest is the fact that in certain versions of a story, from the remake of a film to a new elaboration of a given myth, the main hero changes character, from an evil one to a good one. ... In the original version, the monk is a good character, who exposes the wicked nature of the woman. In a later version however of this myth, staged by the Peking Opera, the woman is a good character, who saves her husband’s life, and the monk is a wicked character, separating the young lovers from each other. ... In other words, good and evil characters are the same for the author and for the readers as well. ... 4 Hunter, Americans are intended to be the good characters, and the Vietnamese the evil. ... In the last few decades however, Indians in films like The Little big Man (1970), starring Dusting Hoffman and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, (1990), who has also the leading role, Indians figure as good characters. Even where they don’t figure as main characters, like in Jakie Chan’s Shanghai noon (2000), directed by Tom Dey, they are allies to the good white characters. ... In modern narratives good and bad characters invariably figure in sheer opposition. When attempting to approach masterpieces of the past this entails the danger of misunderstanding them, in trying to identify good and bad characters. ... A modern reader, seeing or reading the play, influenced by this manichaeistic code of reception which distinguishes between good and evil characters, tends to see a “good” Antigone, victim of a “bad” Creon. What we actually have, however, is not a good and a bad character, but two tragic characters. ... There are wicked characters who carry within themselves the good, but which is revealed to us (and to them) only at the end, in the so-called effect of the unexpected. ... The reader or the spectator, identifying with the good characters who finally prevail, defeating the evil in the imaginative sphere of the narrative art, soothes his anguish and exorcises the evil which surrounds him.