Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.
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Ready to uncover the plot?
To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right.
Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…
The Pull of Gravity
8.
When Dr. Ryan Stone, Sandra Bullock’s character in Alfonso Cuarón’s film, Gravity, becomes stranded in space after the destruction of her space shuttle, her objective becomes a simple one: stay alive. Although Jane Austen’s Emma considers the possibility of a life lived as an unmarried woman, eventually Mr. Knightley’s virtues win her heart. Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Black Mischief, explores the possibility that England may be just as barbarous as his imaginary African banana republic, Azania. And works as different as Oedipus Rex and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer show us protagonists whose lives are defined by the search for truth.
This collection of stories illustrate the four principal impulses of human nature; they show us that human beings always and everywhere desire (1) continued existence, (2) romantic attachments and family life, (3) friendships and just social and political communities beyond the family, and (4) truth. Our impulses for this collection of goods are the starting points of both our, and any fictional character’s, quest for happiness.
Which is to say that these natural inclinations are not aspects of ourselves that we choose. If our life is in danger, as Dr. Ryan Stone demonstrates, we don’t typically stand around debating whether or not we want to stay alive. Nature simply “takes over” and we do whatever is necessary to maintain ourselves in existence. The same goes for the other goods toward which we are naturally inclined. No one has to teach us to have romantic impulses, to want a family life of some sort, to want friends to whom we can confide our hearts, to prefer truth to falsity, illusion, and sham appearance. In fictional worlds, such goods comprise the “needs” that characters must learn to distinguish from their “wants.”
The goods to which our human nature inclines, in other words, make up the backbone of the happiness plot that every character, real or imagined, is destined to live.
* The images above are of “The Declaration House” in Philadelphia, a reconstruction of the house where Thomas Jefferson retired to write about the self-evident truths of our shared human nature.
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