You Owe It to Yourself

obligation--a duty felt by a character to perform; a debt to be repaid under specific circumstances; acknowledgment of a favor given and the subsequent expectation that an act of similar consequence will balance the account.

Obligations may be established between individuals and groups such as banks, clans, or families; they may apply to complete strangers as well as friends or relatives. In fiction, obligations may be real or imagined, tugging at the conscience and patience of the parties involved. Often felt as duties "owed" an older generation by a younger one, obligations literally have the power to disrupt lives, cause rebellious behavior, and produce the abrupt consequences of impatience and anarchy.

A character's hackles may be seen to rise when he is told, "It is your duty..." The building blocks of duty and, often, guilt become building blocks to story as yet another basic element of story is moved into place, the element of resentment.

The cloud of obligation has hovered over the human species throughout its development; in many cases survival of a prehistoric band or clan depended on it. A traveler accepting hospitality at the home of a friend or someone recommended by a friend was obligated to return the hospitality if the circumstances were reversed. Tradition placed heavy weights on the obligation of hospitality; if you accepted a person's hospitality, that individual became responsible for your welfare, a circumstantial crucible that could and undoubtedly did provide unexpected story elements.

It can be argued with some thought of success that a country in possession of the knowledge of nuclear fission has the obligation to use that knowledge to enhance the prospect of comfortable and peaceful living among the nations. An individual with knowledge of a crime has an obligation to take action to the point where justice will be served.

All the various narrative genera may be seen as reflecting obligations. Mystery readers, for example, expect challenging puzzles, thus the obligation of the mystery writer to make the mystery as intriguing as possible without removing it from the sphere of plausibility. It becomes the writer's obligation to provide elements a reader of that genre has come to expect, additional obligations include providing those elements with imagination and originality. It may even be argued that at some point a writer is obligated to interest as many readers as possible.

A 1972 play by Neil Simon, The Sunshine Boys, becomes an instructive example of the explosive relationship between obligation and resentment. Al Lewis and Willy Clark are a one-time vaudeville team who worked together on stage for forty years, during the course of which they attracted a large, loyal following. Trouble is, they grew to hate one another, spoke only when on stage during a performance. Clark, the stubborn one, resented Lewis' decision to break up the act and retire from show business. Now he has to make it on his own, doing commercials for a potato chip maker. The story begins with a television network inviting the team to reunite for a special tribute to the history of comedy. Neil Simon has caught with his superb rendition of the feuding team the combustive chemistry between the two characters, helping us see the potential for placing obligation and resentment in motion as the embodiment of two cantankerous old performers.

Obligations are like visiting relatives; they drop in unannounced, stay too long, often leave a mess. And they are always "away" should you ever need a place to stay. You could smolder with resentment or use the list of personally felt obligations as a laundry list for story opportunities.

Front Tier Justice

ghost of Hamlet's father, the--a young prince being invoked by his father's ghost to pursue revenge on his uncle; a metaphor by which a character is reminded of some debt from the past, related to a much loved or much feared friend, relative, or mentor, calling upon the character to become an instrument of revenge; the forces of guilt or retribution conspiring to drive a character to exact payback for events not directly related to him; the long, heavy-handed reach of obligation, conflicting with a character's personal agenda.

The ghost of Hamlet's father wants revenge against Claudius, his brother, for having murdered him and subsequently become the husband of Gertrude, his widow. What better instrument for the ghost than his son? A productive line of inquiry in family and dynastic narratives, placing the squeeze of conscience and duty on the present day protagonist, undercutting his or her own ambitions and recipe for achieving them.

In the traditional ghost story, the ghost has remained in a particular corner of reality, wanting retribution or some related form of justice before moving on to its place in history, reaching across time and cultures for an instrument to represent it in the here and now. Thus haunting is brought into the dramatic sphere as a force that wants something, reminding characters of obligations, debts unpaid, talents undeveloped, justice hanging fire--all of these connective tissue to someone, some ideal, some unfinished business. Thus too the haunted character is placed in the exquisite conflict between his goals and those of another, placing the haunted in a position to discover attitudes, qualities, and techniques which will allow him or her to cope on behalf of another, then become that great dialectic of independence with a long list of influential connections.

Not all ghosts rattle chains or moan at midnight, some are more subtle, attracting their mortal instruments across centuries, cultures, traditions, drawing complete strangers into their orbit. Sometimes the instrument of justice is merely an individual who speaks up to insist that Uncle Fred may have likes his peppermint schnapps but he was as well a wise, empathetic, and kindly man. In another such a fanciful scenario, the ghost and mortal instrument could easily be as diverse as, say the iconic but no-nonsense English poet great, John Milton, and a word-loving hip-hop singer from South Philly, happening on an unpublished manuscript in a centuries-old reading room at a college in England, then bring yet one more last and resonant word, perhaps his most important word of all, from the old poet to the world of literature. Thus too the genie in the bottle, waiting with growing impatience for someone--anyone--to find the bottle in which he has been imprisoned for thousands of years, remove the stopper, which allows the genie to step out for a stretch.


justice--a sense of closure to a conflicted outcome; the payoff of a story; the rendition of a negotiated settlement on some moral, ethical, or artistic conflict.

In a legal sense, justice should be impartial, balanced, perhaps not quite satisfactory to all built at least carrying a sense of attempted fairness. In the sense of reality, which fiction approaches with some degree of ironic vision, justice is more likely to reflect blindness or bias or rank unfairness, even to the point of referring to some outcomes as poetic justice.

One instructive way of determining the attitudes and visions of a particular writer is to consider how that writer's stories payoff as related to a scale of justice. Suggested authors on whom to start: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, Willa Cather. Another instructive approach is to ask after reading any work of fiction, Was justice done in this story?