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Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man
That said, I cannot, as I have said previously, agree that a reader’s response to a work of fiction cannot necessarily tell us anything about that reader. It depends what the work of fiction is. Your examples of Tom & Jerry and South Park are false analogies. One has to look at the context of the fictional world in which the events portrayed take place. Where violence takes place in a cartoon context, where it is understood by the viewer that its purpose is humour, that it is not intended to raise moral issues, and that no “real harm” ever comes to the protagonists, then I see no problem in that. But where evil, torture and suffering are portrayed in a world with a similar moral code to that of our own society and are portrayed as causing real harm in that fictional world, and where morality is necessarily implicated by the creation and portrayal of good beings and evil beings, then it seems to me that it does say something about the reader’s morality if they genuinely side with those who are portrayed as evil and who are responsible for the torture, murder and suffering, and regard those things as worthy (as opposed to simply finding them interesting, playing at sympathising with them, or admiring certain (admirable) qualities in them).
I note that you did not address my examples of 1984 and Silence of the Lambs. Would you draw no conclusions about a reader if they were genuinely to sympathise with the stated aims and actions of Big Brother and thought Winston Smith had it coming to him, or if they were genuinely to regard Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism as acceptable? If not, then we have no common ground here, because I most certainly would.
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And I can only restate my opinion that it all depends on how the reader treats the story. What you may find to be a work with an ethical stance may be read by the another person as no more 'real', with no more relation to the real world than South Park or Tom & Jerry.
In short, the reader may not take the work seriously. One is not obliged to. One of Lal's favourite movies is The Wicker Man (the original). She takes it absolutely seriously & finds the ending horrific. I found it comical & thought the ending hilarious. Christopher Lee singing 'Summer is icummen in' & prancing around in a dress while Edward Woodward goes up in flames was the most surreal & hilarious thing I can remember. I found 1984 so over the top - as did Aldous Huxley btw - & Silence of the Lambs so ridiculously far up its own fundament that I couldn't take either of them seriously, & to be honest, if 1984 had ended with Big Brother dancing around in a dress singing 'Summer is icummen in' while Winston was scoffed by rats it would not have seemed out of place. And if Hannibal had eaten the annoying Clarice's liver with some fava beans & a nice chianti I wouldn't have blamed him.
A reader will respond to a text as they wish. For some readers The Sil is as far fetched as South Park & a lot less entertaining. I respect their right to feel that way about it, even though I do not share their view, & don't therefore think I can draw any conclusions about their morality as far as events in the real world are concerned.