Moral 70174 222197131 2008-06-28T01:09:40Z Bobo192 97951 Reverted edits by [[Special:Contributions/24.62.169.243|24.62.169.243]] ([[User talk:24.62.169.243|talk]]) to last version by Gail {{this|the use of the moral in storytelling|morality}} {{Wiktionary}} A '''moral''' is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. As an example of the latter, at the end of [[Aesop's Fables|Aesop's fable]] of [[the Tortoise and the Hare]], in which the plodding and determined tortoise wins a race against the much-faster yet extremely arrogant hare, the moral is "slow and steady wins the race." The use of [[stock characters]] is a means of conveying the moral of the story by eliminating complexity of personality and so spelling out the issues arising in the interplay between the characters, enabling the writer to make clear the message. With more rounded characters, such as those typically found in [[Shakespeare]]'s [[Play (theatre)|plays]], the moral may be more nuanced but no less present, and the writer may point it up in other ways (see, for example, the [[Prologue]] to ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]''.) Throughout the history of recorded literature, the majority of fictional writing has served not only to entertain but also to instruct, inform or improve their audiences or readership. In [[Ancient Greek theatre|classical drama]], for example, the role of the [[Greek chorus|chorus]] was to comment on the proceedings and draw out a message for the audience to take away with them; while the [[novel]]s of [[Charles Dickens]] are a vehicle for morals regarding the social and economic system of [[Victorian morality|Victorian]] Britain. Morals have typically been more obvious in [[children's literature]], sometimes even being introduced with the phrase, "The moral of the story is …". Such explicit techniques have grown increasingly out of fashion in modern storytelling, and are now usually only included for [[irony|ironic]] purposes. As [[Oscar Wilde]] observes wryly, ''The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.''<ref>[http://www.litquotes.com/quote_author_resp.php?AName=Oscar%20Wilde] Accessed 30 October 2006.</ref> Some examples are: "Better be safe than sorry", "The evil deserves no aid", "Be friends with whom you don't like", "Don't judge people by the way they look", "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me" and "Slow and steady wins the race". ==References== <references /> [[Category:Literature]] [[Category:Fiction]] [[Category:Theme]] [[es:Moraleja]] [[gl:Moral]] [[mk:Наравоучение]] [[pt:Moralidade]] [[simple:Moral]] [[sk:Epimýtia]] [[sv:Sensmoral]]