Hope is one of the most important emotions in literature. It’s the thing that drives us forward, even when things look really, really bad. In every story, there’s a moment when you just don’t think you can do it anymore. Everything is too hard. Maybe you should just give up.
“Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
– Sam in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (movie)
Spotlight on: HOPE
Remember the Little Engine That Could? Even when all the bigger, stronger engines had given up, the Little Engine kept on trying to get to the top of the mountain, chanting “I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can”. And it did.
Hope is one of the most important emotions in literature. It’s the thing that drives us forward, even when things look really, really bad. In every story, there’s a moment when you just don’t think you can do it anymore. Everything is too hard. Maybe you should just give up. The Dark Lord’s power is stronger than ever. The guy you like has asked your best friend out on a date. It feels like you’ll never solve that mystery, or find that lost magic sword. You keep going, because you have hope.
It’s like falling off a horse – you have to get back on again. You have to go on with the quest. Imagine what might have happened if Harry Potter had just thrown up his hands and walked away.
Some books – like David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy – are set in hopeful worlds, where discrimination is a thing of the past and everyone (more or less) gets along. Other books are the opposite. In John Green’s The Fault in our Stars, the protagonist Hazel is dying of cancer. It’s a book that could be very depressing – but somehow it’s infused with an incredibly powerful sense of hope and optimism.
Sometimes the darkest, most dystopian books – like Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Marie Lu’s Legend, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go – are the ones that are the most hopeful. Because those worlds are so bad, and people’s lives are so dark and oppressed, the heroes of those stories try that much harder, because they are hoping for a better world.
Can a novel give you hope? What do you hope for?