So they all lived happily ever after.
My narrator knows better than this. As Blackie Ryan notes elsewhere, the most one can expect is that they have only two or three big fights a week.
Blackie will settle for one day of happiness a week, some weeks.
Yet Msgr. Ryan and his various creators have been criticized for being unrealistically hopeful. Life is after all a vale of tears, abounding in suffering, sickness, injustice, and death. Plot, especially the fiction of an ending which imposes meaning, is a fallacy.
Or, to put it differently, the cosmos in which we live is a good deal more complex and problematic than the narrator’s fictional cosmos down the block. He (and I with his uninspired cooperation) has created a world in which there are solid grounds for hope, plausible reasons for seeing purpose, justifiable arguments for an Other Person who loves.
But that, as Bastian says in The Never Ending Story, is only a story.
Hope, purpose, and love are not always reflected in daily life and often not at all in some lives. My friend David Lodge in his Out of the Shelter describes his narrator as praying for his childhood friend Jill who is killed in an air raid and not praying for his wife when he fears in sudden panic she may drown. How can there be purpose and hope and reason for prayer in a world in which children are killed in air raids?
Yet his narrator swims eagerly to his wife when she surfaces uninjured in the pool.
Is the story really never ending? Videtur quod non, as the scholastics put it. It often seems not.
Is the “wild cry of longing” which Nathan Scott sees in the child’s demand “Momma, tell me a story!” self-deceptive or revelatory?
Is the mystery that happiness is limited or that there is any happiness at all? Is the proper question not whether despair is more tough-minded than hope, but whether it is correct?
Does a story, finally any story, no matter how pessimistic as Professor Lodge clearly perceives, put hope in life that isn’t there, or does it draw out of life hope that is there but which without the story we cannot see?
Is the story if not true at least True?
Ah, but as the Irish would say, that’s another story altogether!
Then again maybe not. Maybe it’s the only story, your story, my story, every story.