Violence is everywhere in literature. We’d lose most of Shakespeare without it, and Homer and Ovid and Marlowe (both Christopher and Philip), much of Milton, Lawrence, Twain, Dickens, Frost, Tolkien, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Saul Bellow, and on and on. I guess Jane Austen wouldn’t be too much affected, but relying on her would leave our reading a little thin. It seems, then, that there’s no option for us but to accept it and figure out what it means.
Would the author of the book consider violence a necessary component of literature? As in, a good book should necessarily have violence? If a book is absent of violence, isn’t the author able to represent conflict in a different way?
