"Is it fair to compare them? I mean, do death by consumption or heart disease really fall into the same universe as a stabbing?
Sure. Different but the same. Different:no guilty party exists in the narrative (unless you count the author, who is present everywhere and nowhere). Same: does it really matter to the dead person? Or this: writers kill off characters for the same set of reasons-make action happen, cause plot complications..."
-In this chapter ... More than It's Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence, Foster discusses the two kinds of violence in novels and discussed the effects of both. He addresses the two categories as the "Specific injury that authors cause characters to visit on one another or on themselves" and also narrative violence that is made to cause characters harm in general. He characterizes the first group as violent act like murder, fighting, stabbing, and other direct, "character to character" run ins's. He then addresses the next kind of violence as something that the author injects into the story line that the characters are not responsible for, but causes the suffering. Foster discusses that often in literature there is much more meaning, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally, to the overall death or act of violence. Foster again, I believe, ties in the idea that all stories are somehow related or tied together by similarities, in this case similar violent acts are shared between works. Not only this but behind most acts of violence their is an unseen aspect to the situation that could involve religion, morals, ethics, or philosophy. Violence can be found everywhere in literature and after reading this chapter it became more obvious to me that most major pieces of writing would be nowhere without the acts of violence that make them up.
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