The Moral of the Story is...

I'm still having trouble agreeing with Mr. Sexson's argument that the moral of every story IS the story. I understand that for every story there is multiple meanings and multiple morals. I understand that their are layers to every story and one cannot assume that the author had a singular message, but I feel this type of thinking creates chaos.

Up to this point in the class, we have assumed that every story is a retelling of another story and that authors have been recycling ideas over centuries. This assumption leads us to believe that the author really does not matter, but it is the text and what the reader can extract that becomes important. The stories from "Monsters and Heroes" all tell the same story and the author becomes irrelevant. The relationship between the reader and the text are what stand out.

Now we have learned that the text can be interpreted by the author and that each text has multiple meanings. It is an insurmountable task to examine every concieveable meaning of every concievable text, Tim had joked previously in class that a fail-safe solution to answer test questions is to simply write "all that" after each answer. I will take this one step further and infer that if the interpretation of the text is unique and personal, than we can write interpret a text however we want and there simply is no wrong answer. Everything becomes arbitrary; tragedies become comedies, fairytales become nightmares, the greatest piece of literature to one person is the worst piece of literature to another. One could just read one book, say, the bible, and extract all of your literature knowledge from that one book. Each work of literature is just a distorted copy of it, so why waste your time?

My ultimate point, however, is this: people should have explicit morals and not multi-vocal ones. Either you believe people are born inherently evil or you believe they're born inherently good. You're either pro-choice or you're pro-life. You choose to live your life safe and close to the ground or you choose to live it high in the clouds with constant risk of failure. That is why many people, like me, read a story and come away with a core moral instead of several. Specific morals that are passed down from generation to generation, from one story to the next, are what keep societies together. Because if people can't decide on which moral they are going to follow, why follow any of them at all?