ডেসক্রিপশন প্রেসক্রিপশন

Many critics, beginning with Aristotle, have maintained that the purpose of fiction is to instruct people in right action—teach them how to behave, in other words. This seems a little too restrictive to me, although I suppose you could say that in any story the characters are behaving either correctly or incorrectly, and if you care to you can draw a moral from that. But the most interesting stories to me are those in which people are behaving in morally ambiguous ways, so that it's not easy to say that what they're doing is right or wrong.

I'm telling you where I stand so that you can allow for my bias. Other writers—and you may be one of them—prefer stories that demonstrate the correctness of the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, or some other conventional code of conduct. And of course some readers also like these stories; but they tend to age rapidly, because conventional attitudes change. Fiction of this kind written only thirty years ago already looks a little quaint. What seems to me much more interesting and more likely to endure is the story that does not try to prescribe conduct but only to describe it honestly. And this brings me to my point: I think readers of serious fiction are always looking, on some level, for information about what the world is really like—what it means to be human, what it's all about. Any honest answer to this is a good answer, whether it looks like a "theme" or not.

--- Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction