Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35373
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35373
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Two thoughts.

1. Literature is not about the character's emotions. It is about the reader's emotions. In real life, every single TV cop and mystery series detective would be invalided out with PTSD by the traumas they endure. Most fictional heros are far more emotionally resilient that real people (not to mention far more physically durable -- they go through knock-down drag out fights on a weekly basis without ever a cut or a bruise or a lock of hair out of place). If the reader feels the measured amount of thrill or terror or sanctimonious disdain that they came for, that is what matters. 

2. Emotional truth in fiction has little to do with the actual psychology. As noted above, fictional people are commonly more durable than real people. But art is also a lens, a device for focussing attention on one particular aspect of life. All the emotional lines in a good story point towards a single pole, like iron filings aligning around a magnet. This is in some sense a distortion, because real life if much messier. But it is in another sense a profound truth because our attraction to stories is precisely that they seem to make the world more orderly, and, especially in the face of tragedy, we turn to stories to try to make sense of things, aligning the random tragedies of life into a more coherent tragedy that we can make more sense of. It is, therefore, psychologically reasonable for your hero to do this. But more to the point, it is what you reader will want your story to do. 

Original score: 1