Depicting Goodness in Literature
"...you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good – and that’s complicated.”
How does an author portray genuine goodness in a character? A goodness that permeates a life and alters nearly every interaction without coming across as disingenuous or moralizing?
Think about your own reading life. How often do you encounter a character in literature you wish to fully emulate? Crime and Punishment is a fantastic novel addressing deep questions, but I don’t wake up in the morning wishing to live like Raskolnikov. There are a number of heroes in the Iliad with admirable qualities, but none I’d wish to emulate completely.
As Toni Morrison has said, depicting evil is easy and is something a child can do:
“I just think goodness is more interesting. Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good – and that’s complicated.”1
I can think of three novels that present a protagonist of true goodness. They are:
Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
Take Gibbie. He’s a childlike and speechless protagonist whose life transforms nearly everyone he encounters. In one memorable scene, a town pastor is looking down on a woman in pain wondering if he should do something about it while Gibbie is actually down there helping the woman.
With Gibbie, Theo, and Jayber, I found myself wanting to be like these men. But perhaps more importantly, these characters were presented in a way that made the very quest of this type of goodness attainable. These men aren’t saints. They deal in the mess, suffering, and difficulty of life. There is no sugar-coated goodness here. It’s a goodness steeped in reality, of sharing in suffering, and of calling out the best in others in a deep and transformative way.
As I read these works, I wonder what is required of an author to depict such goodness in the written word. As Morrison points out, depicting evil comes easy. Depicting goodness requires something more. Something that perhaps must be forged through actual suffering in the life of the author. We all have very developed radars that can identify a cheesy and unrealistic portrayal of goodness.
When goodness is presented well, it permeates the entire life of the character. Theo of Golden does not just do good things, he is a good man. Evil characters are capable of random acts of kindness, but how does one flip the script to where kindness is the norm? That requires a transformed character, one constantly battling the preservation of self to look to the needs of others.
If this all sounds rather strange, I invite you to pick up one of the books above. I recently finished Theo of Golden. That would be a good place to start. See if you find yourself longing to live like Theo and not only that but believing it to be possible.
If you’d like to learn more about the three books mentioned above, here are podcast episodes for each work:
Happy to be introduced to Theo of Golden. Added it to my TBR list. I recently read Bleak House, and I believe Esther Summerson and John Jarndyce are both good, as you described.
I like this idea a lot. Thanks for getting me to think about this topic. One classic novel I just read that showed a couple of characters with goodness was Middlemarch by George Eliot. Dorothea and Mr. Garth are great people.
I’ll definitely look into the three novels you mentioned in the article. Thanks.