Between the Lines: Fiction Does Not Owe Us a Lesson

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes on the tyranny of the takeaway, the uses of imagination, and the freedom to read without having to learn something.

I have often found myself trying to explain what a book gave me, as though the pleasure of having read it were not quite sufficient, as though I needed to return from its pages carrying something I could name and hold up as evidence that the time had been well spent. A thought I had not considered before, a new understanding of human behaviour, or a sentence that rearranged something in my mind are satisfying answers, and I have offered them often enough.

But what do I say about the books I loved simply because I wanted to remain in their worlds, because I cared what happened to people who did not exist, because the possibility of another life, another landscape, another version of reality was reason enough to keep turning the pages? Must I find a lesson in those books, too, before I can defend my attachment to them?

I wonder when reading acquired this burden of usefulness, when the question What did you learn? began to seem more legitimate than What did you imagine? We rarely feel the need to justify every hour spent listening to music or looking at a painting by listing what it has taught us, yet fiction is often expected to produce something that can be carried back into ordinary life, a moral, an insight, a better understanding of ourselves or the world. I understand the desire. Books can teach us a great deal. But I have begun to wonder whether, in asking every story to account for what it gives us, we have made ourselves less receptive to the things that cannot be counted as knowledge, and whether imagination needs to be useful before we allow ourselves to enjoy it.

There is a question we have learnt to ask about books, often before we have even finished reading them: what did you take away from it? We ask this of novels we recommend to friends, of books discussed in reading groups, of stories we remember from childhood and those we encounter much later in life. The question seems harmless enough, even sensible. We want to know what stayed with someone, what moved them, what made them think. Somewhere along the way, the idea of a takeaway has acquired the weight of a justification. A book ought to leave us with something we can name, a lesson we can apply, a new understanding we can carry into our lives. If we cannot identify what we have learnt, we begin to wonder whether the hours spent reading were well spent at all.

This expectation is particularly visible in the way we distinguish fiction from nonfiction. We read history to understand the past, psychology to understand ourselves, biographies to learn from another person’s life, and self-help books to discover how we might live better. Nonfiction appears to arrive with its purpose already declared. Fiction, meanwhile, is often asked to account for itself. What does a novel teach us? What wisdom does it offer? What is the point of spending three hundred pages with imaginary people when the world is full of real lives from which we might learn something useful? The questions are not unreasonable, but they reveal how readily we have begun to measure reading by the knowledge it produces, as though a book were an investment whose returns ought to be assessed before we move on to the next one.

Our oldest stories, of course, have encouraged this habit. The Panchatantra and the Hitopadesha were built around the transmission of practical wisdom, using animal fables, cunning reversals and tales of friendship and betrayal to teach readers how to navigate a world in which trust could be dangerous, appearances deceptive and intelligence a better defence than strength. The stories of Birbal and Tenali Rama reward wit and expose vanity, while Mulla Nasruddin’s tales turn familiar assumptions inside out, leaving us laughing at the foolishness of those who believe themselves wise. These stories entertain, but they also instruct. A clever jackal, a foolish king or a courtier who sees through a deception becomes a way of thinking about human behaviour, and the lesson often survives because the story has made it memorable.

There is something worth noticing, though, about what happens between the telling of a story and the lesson we extract from it. A child listening to a tale about Tenali Rama may be delighted by the ingenuity of the solution long before understanding what it says about pride or power. The pleasure of the story is what makes the teaching possible. The child remembers the trick, the surprise, the moment when the apparently helpless character turns the situation around. The moral may be what an adult explains afterwards, but the story has already done its work in the imagination. It has made a world available, and the lesson has travelled through that world rather than arriving as an instruction from outside it.

As we grow older, we become more insistent about the instruction and sometimes less willing to admit how much the experience itself matters. We learn to distinguish serious reading from escapism, important books from guilty pleasures, literature from entertainment, as though imagination were an indulgence we ought to outgrow unless it could be made to serve a higher purpose. We are encouraged to read for empathy, cultural awareness, emotional intelligence, intellectual development and self-improvement. These are all valuable things, and fiction can offer them in abundance. But when they become the only acceptable reasons to read, we begin to treat the imagination as a means to an end, rather than a human capacity with a value of its own.

What, after all, is the takeaway from entering a world that never existed? What practical lesson are we supposed to extract from a novel whose characters make terrible decisions, misunderstand one another, repeat their mistakes and arrive at endings that offer no clear resolution? A book may give us no new fact, no method to apply, and no principle to carry into a difficult conversation the following morning. It may leave us with an image, a landscape, a voice or an atmosphere that returns to us years later for reasons we cannot quite explain. It may make us feel the weight of a life unlike our own, or allow us to inhabit a possibility that the world around us has declared impossible. The experience may resist summary, and its consequences may be impossible to measure, but neither makes it futile.

Imagination is often spoken of as though it were a retreat from reality, a pleasant diversion from the serious business of living. Still, the ability to imagine beyond what we already know is one of the ways we come to recognise that the world as it exists is not the only world that could exist. Fantasy makes this possibility visible through magic, invented kingdoms, impossible journeys and creatures that refuse the limits of the natural world. Realist fiction performs a similar act without requiring anything supernatural. It takes us into the consciousness of another person, gives shape to lives we might never encounter, and allows us to see the familiar arrangements of family, class, caste, gender, love and power from an unfamiliar angle. A novel need not tell us how to change the world in order to make the world appear less inevitable.

Think of the strange intimacy we develop with fictional characters. We worry about people who have never existed, grow impatient with their choices, wish they would recognise what we can see, and sometimes grieve for them when their stories end. We may return to a book years later and discover that a character we once judged harshly now seems more comprehensible, or that a passage we had scarcely noticed has become unexpectedly important. The book has not changed; we have. It is tempting to call this learning, and it is learning in a sense, but the word does not quite contain the experience. We have not necessarily acquired a new piece of information. We have lived alongside an imagined consciousness long enough for our own perspective to shift, and the change may be too gradual, too personal or too difficult to articulate to become a neat takeaway.

This is also why fiction need not make its characters morally exemplary. A novel can ask us to remain in the company of someone whose actions we condemn, to understand the history of a cruelty without excusing it, or to recognise the humanity of a person we would rather dismiss. It can show us goodness that goes unrewarded and wrongdoing that escapes punishment. Such stories may frustrate our desire for moral order, particularly when we have grown accustomed to narratives in which virtue is vindicated and vice exposed. Yet a world in which every action receives its appropriate consequence would be a poor imitation of the world we inhabit. Fiction can take morality seriously without turning it into an arrangement of rewards and punishments, and it can leave us uncertain without having failed to make its point.

There is a danger, certainly, in making too much of fiction’s capacity to improve us. Reading a novel does not automatically make a person more compassionate, any more than reading a book about history guarantees a better understanding of the present. We can read selectively, admire the prose and ignore the lives it depicts, or use a story to confirm prejudices we already hold. Imagination is not a certificate of virtue. But this is no reason to dismiss its possibilities.

Perhaps our insistence on a lesson comes from a desire for certainty. A moral gives a story a recognisable destination. It tells us this is what happened, this is what it means, and this is what you should remember. A novel may refuse to close the matter. Its characters do not always learn from their mistakes, suffering does not reliably produce wisdom, and the truth may remain divided among people who see the same events differently. We finish the book without knowing precisely what to think, and the absence of a conclusion can feel like an absence of purpose. But there is a difference between a story that has nothing to say and one that refuses to say only one thing. Sometimes the uncertainty is where the work continues, long after the final page.

None of this requires us to abandon the lessons that books offer. There are stories we return to because they helped us understand grief, friendship, ambition or injustice; there are novels that have altered the way we see a particular community or historical moment. A book can be both pleasurable and instructive, and there is no virtue in refusing to learn from what we read. The problem begins when learning becomes the sole measure of value, when we feel obliged to account for every hour spent with a novel by identifying the knowledge gained or the person we have become. We allow ourselves to listen to music without demanding that every song improve our understanding of the world, or to look at a painting without insisting that it leave us with a practical skill. Reading, too, can be an encounter with beauty, strangeness, pleasure and possibility, and these experiences need not be converted into something else before they are allowed to matter.

There is a particular freedom in reading a story simply because we want to know what happens next, because we want to remain in a world that has taken hold of us, because the language makes us pause or because the imagination has opened a door we did not know was there. We need not defend that pleasure by arguing that it makes us more productive, more empathetic or more informed. Sometimes a story gives us knowledge; sometimes it changes the shape of a question; sometimes it offers nothing that we can explain, only the memory of having been somewhere else for a while. The desire to make every experience useful can leave very little room for experiences whose value lies in the fact that they cannot be measured.

Fiction does not owe us a lesson in order to justify its existence. Its value may lie in what it teaches, but it may also lie in what it allows us to imagine, in the certainties it unsettles, in the lives it makes visible and in the worlds it opens that we would otherwise never have entered. A story can leave us wiser, but it can also leave us wondering. It can offer an answer, or make us more attentive to the questions we have been asking badly. And sometimes it can simply carry us somewhere beyond the boundaries of our own lives, into a place of magic, possibility and invention, where the experience of having been there is enough.

Perhaps the question worth asking is not what we take away from a book, but why we have come to believe that we must take something away at all. We enter stories because the world is larger than the lives available to us, because we want to imagine what we have not seen and feel what we have not felt, because for a little while the boundaries of the possible can move.

If a novel leaves us with a lesson, we can keep it. If it leaves us with a question, we can live with that, too. And if all it gives us is the pleasure of having imagined another world into being, that, too, is a reason to read.

About the Author

Namrata is the editor of Kitaab. She is a writer, editor, podcast host, literary critic, and founder of Bookbots India and Keemiya Creatives.

She can be found on X | LinkedIn.

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