“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “books are well written or badly written, that is all.” Wilde was correct. Moral considerations should be suspended when evaluating a work of art. A novel may contain unpleasant characters, but it does not follow that the novelist himself is immoral for creating those characters in the first place. The function of a flawed or immoral protagonist may be to remind us of our own corruptible natures, to introduce complexity to a story’s people and dilemmas, or simply to illuminate humanity in all its variety and peculiarity. A novel filled with moral goodness and clarity will not be not true to life.
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