>>After all that search, we discover that the niece has grown to be closer to her kidnapper who raised her than her biological family.

Not only that, the John Wayne character, Ethan Edwards, initially wants to kill her for that reason. (Another possible plot point : what would the good brother do upon discovering that the leader of pirates who have pillaged and plundered his community is his brother?)

Nir Shelter:

The theme of your story, how one ought to act and react in the presence of suffering, is an important one. However, my own response to your specific treatment of that theme is ambivalent, and colored by a strong personal bias.

Let me say up front that I detested “Patch Adams”. Not that I question the intuitive wisdom in the old saw that laughter is the best medicine. [See “Anatomy of an Illness” by Norman Cousins] But I don’t think it is a panacea for whatever ails the human spirit, let alone the human body. And as with any other medicine, the results are contingent on it being prescribed prudently, for the correct malady, in the the right dose, at the right time, for the appropriate duration.

In regards to your character: does the doctor really think that making the kid laugh will cure his cancer? Why does the doctor persist in trying to manipulate the kid? What problem is the doctor really struggling with?

You suggest his character flaw is “naive sentimentality”. But I would suggest shifting the focus of the flaw to another aspect you mentioned: his inability to work through the grieving process.

I presume you are aware of the 5 stages of K?bler-Ross model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Might his efforts at manipulation (dammit kid, smile!) be a pathetic, desperate compensation for being stuck in the pit of his own despair– depression?

Maybe he needs a healthy dose of the medicine he’s trying to cram down the kid’s throat. Physician heal thyself.

Not with feigned laughter, or manipulated laughter, but honest, spontaneous laughter arising from accepting life as a mixed bag of tragedy AND comedy. Accepting that they are inseparable. Accepting that he must embrace both rather than try to avoid or deny the former or attempt to separate it from the latter.

Just as at the great Dionysian festival in ancient Greece, poets were required to submit 4 plays for the drama competition: 3 tragedies and a comedy. The audience was subjected to three doses of woe and suffering — and then sent home with the balm of comic relief . Not one, but 2 prescriptions of dramatic catharsis: tears and laughter. (Something most scholars who obsess about what the heck Aristotle meant by catharsis seem to overlook, focusing as they do only on tragedy.)

And that, I submit, is a more efficacious intuitive wisdom.