On moral dilemmas and narrative interest

​Thinking about why we are liking reading George Eliot so much, I wonder whether moral dilemmas are really what all narratives are about, or all interesting narratives, and are what we read novels for, whether we are placed in the position of a character having to make a moral decision, sympathetic to the difficulties of the decision, as in a George Eliot novel or a novel by Anthony Trollope, or whether we read for insights into the characters of others, seeing how other people judge character and becoming alert to the clues other people are reading, or misreading, as in a novel by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens – with more or less subtle clues.  But then I wondered whether we even make primarily moral decisions any more, or whether we frame our decisions in other terms, as strategic decisions to effect particular goals.  (But how to do we decide on the goals?  Not in moral terms, but in terms of the games we find ourselves playing?) What is at stake in the decisions people make in novels now?  The contemporary novels that have made the most impact on me have been about the highest stakes moral decisions, and decisions that are almost impossible to make in an uncertain situation, a supernatural situation in both cases – the time-travelling scenario of Sandra Newman’s The Heavens, and the alternative life scenario of Jo Walton’s My Real Children.  Both are about the apocalyptic futures we are looking at, the apocalyptic futures that we are creating as a society, and what responsibility the individual has to try and avert the apocalypse, and a momentous, overwhelming responsibility is at least a plausible reading of the answer both novels could suggest although in both cases this reading is ambiguous.  In both those novels, too, as well as in the novels by Eliot and Trollope, the moral choices are never all that is at stake in the decisions that have to be made – even if the choice is made on moral grounds, it will affect the protagonists’ happiness, success, wealth, even the lives of others in ways that do not always neatly align, so that the right moral decision won’t necessarily work out best for the protagonist even though we want them to make it.  Maybe this is why many readers prefer Jane Austen to Eliot or Trollope.  As for my own writing, I don’t think my characters have ever made a moral decision in their narrated lives, they are driven by whim and circumstance, as perhaps am I, I can think of very few, if any, decisions I have really made on moral grounds exactly, although in another sense, I am always trying to do the right thing (for the hens, for my children), it is just a question of how, which is what I am usually all at sea over.  As for poetry, I can’t think of any poem I’ve ever written about a moral dilemma, and perhaps that is why I write poetry, not more (and not better) fiction.