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A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. As an example of the latter, at the end of Aesop's fable
Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop , a Slavery and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, especially beast fables involving Anthropomorphism animals....
 of the Tortoise and the Hare
The Tortoise and the Hare

The Tortoise and the Hare is a fable attributed to Aesop. French poet Jean de La Fontaine adapted into the poem: . The story concerns a hare who one day ridiculed a slow-moving tortoise....
, in which the plodding and determined tortoise wins a race against the much-faster yet extremely arrogant hare, the moral is "slow and steady wins the race".






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A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. As an example of the latter, at the end of Aesop's fable
Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop , a Slavery and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, especially beast fables involving Anthropomorphism animals....
 of the Tortoise and the Hare
The Tortoise and the Hare

The Tortoise and the Hare is a fable attributed to Aesop. French poet Jean de La Fontaine adapted into the poem: . The story concerns a hare who one day ridiculed a slow-moving tortoise....
, in which the plodding and determined tortoise wins a race against the much-faster yet extremely arrogant hare, the moral is "slow and steady wins the race". The use of stock characters is a means of conveying the moral of the story by eliminating complexity of personality and so spelling out the issues arising in the interplay between the characters, enabling the writer to make clear the message. With more rounded characters, such as those typically found in Shakespeare's plays, the moral may be more nuanced but no less present, and the writer may point it up in other ways (see, for example, the Prologue
Prologue

Prologue , or prolog, is a preferred piece of writing. The Greek prologos included the modern meaning of prologue, but was of wider significance, embracing any kind of preface, like the Latin praefatio....
 to Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is a Shakespearean tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young "Star-crossed" whose untimely deaths ultimately unite their feuding families....
.)

Throughout the history of recorded literature, the majority of fictional writing has served not only to entertain but also to instruct, inform or improve their audiences or readership. In classical drama, for example, the role of the chorus
Greek chorus

The Greek chorus is a group of twelve or fifteen minor actors in tragedy and twenty-four in Ancient Greek comedy plays of classical Athens....
 was to comment on the proceedings and draw out a message for the audience to take away with them; while the novel
Novel

File:2009 stapelweise Neuerscheinungen im Buchladen.JPGA novel is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern Romance and in the tradition of the novella....
s of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens, Royal Society of Arts , pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English people novelist of the Victorian era, as well as a vigorous Reform movement....
 are a vehicle for morals regarding the social and economic system of Victorian
Victorian morality

Victorian morality is a distillation of the morality views of people living at the time of Victoria of the United Kingdom in particular, and to the moral climate of Great Britain throughout the 19th century in general that were in stark contrast to the morality of the previous Georgian period....
 Britain.

Morals have typically been more obvious in children's literature
Children's literature

Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve and is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes exclude young-adult fiction, comic books, or other genres....
, sometimes even being introduced with the phrase, "The moral of the story is …". Such explicit techniques have grown increasingly out of fashion in modern storytelling, and are now usually only included for ironic
Irony

Irony is a Literary technique or rhetorical device, in which there is an wiktionary:incongruous or wiktionary:discordance between what one says or does and what one means or what is generally understood....
 purposes. As Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish people playwright, Irish poetry and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest Celebrity of his day....
 observes wryly, The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Some examples are: "Better to be safe than sorry", "The evil deserves no aid", "Be friends with whom you don't like", "Don't judge people by the way they look", "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me" and "Slow and steady wins the race".