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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33028
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33028
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I disagree with Amadeus on the matter of becoming the protagonist. I don't think that is what literature does or why readers turn to literature. I think there is always a narrative distance. We are always hearing a story told, and that is a different thing from doing something yourself. If I read about a character having a fight, for instance, it is not because I want to be in a fight. If I wanted to be in a fight, I would go dive bar and knock over a Harley. So in reading about a character having a fight, I am looking for a different kind of experience.

That experience, the experience of story, is a little hard to pin down, which is, I suppose, to say that it is a thing in itself, not a substitute for anything else. It is certainly a kind of experience, but it is also an experience at a distance from the dangers and inconveniences of real experiences. Is it just the safety that stories offer as opposed to reality? I don't think so.

In part, a story allows us to experience the lives of others. It allows women to experience the lives of men, men the lives of women, children the lives of adults and adults the live of children. It allows people of one race and culture to experience the lives of other races and cultures. (This applies as much to the author as to the reader, by the way, since the author must try to put on every member of their cast, young, old, rich, poor, male, female, etc. as they craft their story.) As social animals, we are very much interested in the lives of others and stories seem to be one of the main ways we are able to enter into those lives and thus perhaps understand them better and feel less alone.

But another function of stories is as an antidote to, or a comfort in the face or, or even as a rebuke to, the randomness of life. There is a moral order to stories that we do not necessarily find in the real world. Virtue is rewarded and vice punished. Heroic failure is given dignity and meaning. The thought that our lives are just accidents of fate is intolerable to us. Religions are essentially stories that make lives meaningful. (Which is not to say that one of them, at least, may not be a true story.) But even those who acknowledge no God use stories to create sense and order in their lives. Stories thus seem to fulfil not just a social need but an existential need in us as well.

I have discussed this in terms of stories rather than literature. Literature is a bit of a slippery term and not every story is regarded as literature nor every piece of literature as a story. But I think the answer to the question lies in stories, and in the fundamental needs that they meet for human beings: our need to understand the other, and our need to make sense of our lives.

EDIT: To address the secondary question of whether there is something prose (again I am avoiding the slippery word literature) can do that other media cannot. Prose can, as EM Forster points out in _Aspects of the Novel_, show that which cannot be seen on the surface. The show vs tell doctrine encourages us to show a character's thoughts and emotions through their actions, but Forster points out that not all thoughts or emotions show through action. There are things that people keep inside, and these are often the most important things about a person. Unlike other story media, prose can take us to places and show us things that can neither be seen nor heard.

Original score: 17