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Conclusion: Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories
To understand the narrative logic of modern journalism, it is useful to return briefly to Hristo Smirnenski and his metaphor of the ladder. Smirnenski was a Bulgarian poet and satirist of the early twentieth century, whose work focused on social inequality, urban poverty, and the moral contradictions of modern life. His ladder is not a symbol of progress in the optimistic sense. It is a fragile, ironic structure that connects different social levels while exposing the illusions of ascent. Those who climb it gain visibility and voice, but often at the cost of solidarity, clarity, or truth. The ladder reveals that social mobility is also a narrative construction: who is allowed to speak, who is seen, and whose story is elevated.
Journalism operates through a similar vertical mechanism. It raises certain events, voices, and conflicts onto the public stage, while leaving others below the threshold of visibility. This act of elevation is never neutral. It already implies a story about importance, urgency, and relevance. Smirnenski’s ladder reminds us that every act of “giving voice” is also an act of framing, and that climbing the media ladder can distort as much as it reveals.
If Smirnenski shows how social reality is vertically arranged, Shakespeare’s Hamlet shows how truth itself becomes theatrical. Hamlet understands that power does not reveal itself directly; it performs. His decision to stage a play in order to expose the crime is a recognition that reality often becomes visible only through dramatization. Journalism inherits this paradox. It does not simply uncover facts; it arranges scenes in which contradictions can be perceived. Timing, sequencing, and emphasis become as important as evidence.
Kurt Vonnegut completes this picture by offering a simple but powerful insight: stories move in shapes. His diagrams of rise and fall, loss and recovery, explain why audiences recognise meaning not in isolated facts, but in emotional trajectories. Journalism increasingly relies on these shapes to organise attention. Crises, scandals, and reforms are framed as arcs rather than processes. Events are expected to curve, to escalate, to resolve. What does not bend into a recognisable shape struggles to survive in the media flow.
Taken together, Smirnenski, Hamlet, and Vonnegut describe three dimensions of contemporary journalism. Smirnenski reveals its vertical logic, Hamlet its performative awareness, and Vonnegut its emotional geometry. In the age of media scenarios, journalism no longer simply reports reality; it stages it, elevates it, and shapes it into trajectories that can be followed. The ethical challenge is not to abandon narrative, but to resist false ascents, forced dramas, and premature resolutions. Journalism retains its public function only when it recognises the ladders it builds, the stages it constructs, and the curves it imposes on reality.
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