4-Week: What Goes Around Comes Around—On Vengeance and Justice in Fiction

Life is definitely unfair, but does fiction have to be? We know most stories aren’t fairy tales with morals and happy endings, yet we turn to stories for a version of the world we might wish to see. We expect to find heartbreak and inequity in fiction, but do we also expect stories to have an internal system of justice by which the “good” are in some way rewarded and the “bad” receive their comeuppance? If not, can our reading experience feel dissatisfying, disheartening, even downright infuriating? In this class we will analyze the gratifying workings of karma in fictional worlds by close-reading great examples and applying their lessons to our own writing through discussion and weekly prompts.