Poor Shylock

Greentea said that all my characters are depressed. Nothing good ever happens to them. All lonely, and never find love.

I thought a bit, to come up with a story with a good ending: A guy has a beloved. I kill off his beloved arbitrarily. The guy feels sad. He misses his beloved terribly. He wants her back. He searches for her. He dreams of her. Eventually, the guy goes crazy, and hallucinates the girl. He’s happy again.

An image of happiness doesn’t really come to mind. I can recall moments of bliss from my life. But happiness seems to imply a contentedness I’ve never had. I am always fighting something.

“I am happy” doesn’t say much about what the person is happy about. People can say that “I am happy” in the most incredible circumstances. Not being able to say “I am happy” almost seems immoral. Why am I not getting the most out of life? And I am ungrateful of what I have in life.

* * *

A story with a happy ending doesn’t really have anything to do with happiness. Life isn’t like that. Prince and princess finally get married, but the story doesn’t end there, and they don’t live happily ever after. They grow old and die. The princess, perhaps, would die of childbirth. The prince, likely, my be poisoned by a coveting sibling.

I think that a happy ending is satisfying not because we vicariously experience that bliss. Rather, the craving for a happy ending is a social instinct. Seeing the author putting the characters through all sorts of fanciful tortures, our natural empathy is evoked to wish the pain be lifted. And we sit uncomfortably until the story resolves favourably for the characters. When the pain lifts for the characters, the pain lifts for us as well.

It’s a vicarious act of virtue. We don’t need to do anything, but we get the same feel-good-ness of having helped someone. Happy endings are psychologically satisfying.

What that means, then, is that a happy ending cannot exist by itself. The characters must suffer enough to evoke our empathy, so they deserve the reward when it comes. Even though no magic would protect the hero from certain death; the dead heroine would stay dead; power wins; good things never last; we can’t all be happy…

But then, being cynical is the opposite problem of wanting cheap happy endings. It feels smart to be cynical. Oh, I am no fool, I know how the government really is!

Reality is never that simple. It’s neither entirely good nor entirely bad. There’s no such thing as a happy ending or bad ending. Things end favorably for some people, and unfavorably for others. Antonio’s gain is Shylock loss. It is only a good ending because the reader is manipulated to side with Antonio, so the empathy belongs all to him.

Poor Shylock, persecuted Jew.

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