Between the Lines: How Much Suffering Is Enough?

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes nn fictional agony, literary greatness, and the lives writers ask their characters to endure.

We were discussing books when someone said that in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, it feels as though every terrible thing imaginable happens to Jude. The conversation moved to Premchand’s Godaan, with someone observing that hardly anything good happens to Hori, its protagonist, and yet the novel is considered a masterpiece. I have been thinking about these two remarks ever since, partly because they seem to touch upon something we rarely discuss when we talk about books we admire. We are willing to accept that fiction can be devastating, that a writer might take us into the darkest corners of human experience and leave us there for a while, but somewhere along the way we begin to wonder about the terms of this arrangement. How much suffering can a writer ask us to witness before we start questioning the purpose of it? And when a character’s life seems to consist of one misfortune after another, at what point does our attention shift from the person enduring it to the writer who keeps making it happen?

Jude’s life in A Little Life has become a particularly difficult subject of conversation because of the sheer accumulation of cruelty, trauma, physical pain and loss that defines it. There are readers who find the novel’s emotional intensity inseparable from its insistence on the lasting consequences of abuse, on the ways in which love and friendship can offer shelter without necessarily healing the deepest wounds. Others find themselves resisting the book, feeling that Jude is subjected to so much suffering that the accumulation begins to strain their belief in the story’s purpose. I understand the discomfort. There comes a point when one begins to anticipate the next terrible thing, and this anticipation changes the experience of reading; we are no longer simply discovering a life as it unfolds but bracing ourselves for what the writer might inflict upon it. The character’s pain becomes something we wait for, and that is a troubling position for a reader to occupy.

Hori’s life in Godaan produces a different kind of distress. His aspirations are modest, his obligations immense, and the world he inhabits seems determined to make even the simplest act of living an exercise in endurance. Debt, caste, economic exploitation and social expectations gradually close around him, leaving him with fewer choices at every turn. He wants to provide for his family, preserve his dignity and fulfil the responsibilities his society has taught him to regard as sacred. His goodness offers little protection, and his labour cannot guarantee security. There is a particular sadness in watching someone work so hard towards a life that remains perpetually out of reach, especially when the reader can see how much of his predicament has been arranged by forces beyond his control. The remark that nothing good happens to Hori stays with me because it expresses a genuine response to the novel, while also revealing how readily we measure a fictional life by the happiness it contains.

We carry certain expectations into our reading, even when we believe we have outgrown them. We want suffering to lead somewhere, to produce a change in fortune or character, to yield some recognition that the pain has mattered. When a novel withholds these consolations, we can feel almost cheated, as though we have been made to accompany a character through years of hardship only to arrive at a place of diminished possibility. Yet the world has never been particularly careful about distributing its rewards, and the unfairness of Hori’s life is central to Premchand’s understanding of the society around him. To grant Hori an easy escape might have offered readers relief at the cost of the novel’s truth. His suffering acquires its force through the relationship between an individual life and the structures that steadily wear it down; we recognise, in his fate, an injustice that extends far beyond him.

This is one reason the comparison between Godaan and A Little Life interests me. Both ask us to remain with suffering for an extended period, but the questions they raise about its representation are quite different. In Premchand’s novel, Hori’s hardships lead us towards an understanding of the social and economic order in which he is trapped. In Yanagihara’s novel, the concentration of suffering around Jude brings us face to face with the difficulty of representing trauma that seems to reach into every part of a person’s life. One novel makes the machinery of injustice visible; the other invites us to consider what happens when pain becomes so deeply embedded in an individual’s experience that the possibility of living beyond it begins to recede. Their greatness, where we find it, has to be considered in relation to these larger ambitions.

I wonder whether the problem begins when we mistake the quantity of suffering in a novel for the depth of its insight. A book can leave us exhausted, grieving for people who never existed, unable to put aside the lives we have just encountered. Such a response can be evidence of genuine literary power, but emotional intensity alone tells us little about what a novel has accomplished. A writer can make a character suffer repeatedly and produce an overwhelming response; the harder task is to make each experience alter our understanding of that character, to allow the story to accumulate meaning along with its hardships. When a new misfortune arrives, we should be able to feel that the life has grown more complicated, that something has been exposed or changed, that the experience has entered the character’s world in a way that matters to the story. Otherwise, suffering risks becoming a measure of intensity, each fresh blow required to exceed the last.

There is also the question of what happens to a character when suffering takes up nearly all the space available to them. A person who has endured terrible things continues to have an ordinary life, however difficult that life might be to sustain. There are preferences and irritations, moments of vanity, sudden attachments, humour, selfishness, tenderness, desires that have no apparent connection to the wounds they carry. These details may seem small beside the magnitude of trauma, but they are often what make a character feel fully inhabited. They allow us to imagine a person continuing to exist beyond the worst thing that has happened to them, even when that experience has irrevocably shaped who they are. When pain becomes the principal lens through which we see a character, the rest of their humanity can begin to recede, and we may find ourselves responding more to the suffering the writer has constructed than to the person at its centre.

This is one of the tensions I find difficult to resolve in A Little Life. Jude’s intelligence, professional life, friendships and capacity for attachment give him a world that extends beyond his trauma, and the relationships he forms are essential to our understanding of him. Yet the sheer scale of what he endures can make those other parts of his life feel precarious, as though they are continually being overtaken by the past. Readers will differ in their response to this choice. Some will see it as an uncompromising representation of trauma’s persistence; others will feel that the novel asks so much of Jude, and of the reader, that suffering threatens to become the defining spectacle of his existence. The disagreement seems worth preserving because it points to a real artistic difficulty: how does a writer represent the enduring power of pain while allowing the person who lives with it to retain the fullness and unpredictability of a human being?

The writer has considerable freedom in deciding what a character must endure, and that freedom comes with its own set of artistic responsibilities. Fiction can take us into lives marked by repeated violence, deprivation or loss, and there are experiences for which a single catastrophe would offer a misleading account of reality. Poverty can be cumulative. Discrimination can shape the smallest decisions, and trauma can persist long after the immediate danger has passed. To insist that every character must receive a reprieve after a certain amount of suffering would be to impose an artificial fairness on the world of the novel. Still, a writer has to consider the rhythm and proportion of the story, the difference between an experience that deepens our knowledge and one that merely asks us to feel more intensely. This judgement cannot be reduced to a formula. It depends on the particular life being imagined, the world that life inhabits, and the purpose that suffering serves within the work.

I also think we sometimes approach unhappy endings with an expectation that the writer has failed to give us something in return for our emotional investment. We have spent hundreds of pages with a character, watched them struggle, hoped for relief on their behalf, and we want the story to recognise that hope. The desire is understandable.

Reading involves attachment, and attachment makes us wish for good things for the people we have come to know. But the absence of a happy ending does not make a novel needlessly cruel, just as a character’s redemption does not automatically make a novel sentimental. Hori’s life would lose much of its social force if his goodness were eventually rewarded in a way that made the injustices around him seem temporary or surmountable through perseverance alone. Jude’s story raises difficult questions about whether love can sustain a person whose suffering has shaped so much of his life. Neither character owes us a reassuring conclusion simply because we have suffered alongside them.

What I keep returning to, then, is the distinction between a life that contains suffering and a life that has been made to serve suffering. The first is unavoidable in fiction that takes human experience seriously; the second is an artistic choice, and one that deserves scrutiny. A character can endure extraordinary hardship and still surprise us, resist our expectations, remain difficult to understand. A novel can refuse consolation and still give us moments of tenderness, humour or ordinary pleasure that make its world feel more, rather than less, real. These moments do not cancel out pain. They remind us of the scale of the life in which pain occurs.

Our original conversation began with the feeling that Jude is made to endure too much and that Hori seems to receive too little happiness for all his effort. I am not sure either observation can be settled by deciding on an acceptable quota of misery for a fictional character. What matters more is the life the writer makes visible through it, the social realities or inner contradictions that emerge, and the extent to which we continue to recognise a person beneath the weight of what happens to them. Godaan leaves us with the bleak recognition that decency cannot protect someone from an unjust world. A Little Life leaves readers divided over the representation of trauma and the limits of endurance. Both invite us to consider how fiction makes suffering bearable to read, even when it refuses to make suffering bearable for the people who inhabit its pages.

The most useful question is the one that follows us out of the book: After everything a character has endured, can we still see the life that belongs to them? The answer may depend on the reader, and even on the reading itself. Some novels leave us convinced that their suffering was necessary to the truth they wanted to tell; others leave us uneasy about the price they exacted. That uneasiness has its own value. It asks us to look beyond the spectacle of pain and consider the craft, the imagination and the moral choices through which a writer brings another life into being. A character need not be spared in order to be treated with care. But even in the darkest fiction, I want to feel that the writer has seen more in that character than the terrible things that can be made to happen to them.

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