Every reader has experienced it: you’re swept along by a passage of lofty beauty, a sentence that feels like it might alter the course of your thinking forever—and then, without warning, the author drops in something absurdly trivial. The balloon of emotion deflates. You’ve just encountered bathos.
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The word comes from the Greek bathos (βάθος), meaning “depth.” In English literary criticism, it was first popularized by Alexander Pope in his 1727 satirical essay Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry. Pope wasn’t praising this descent; he was lampooning writers who, striving for the sublime, crashed instead into the ridiculous. Over time, the term has come to mean an abrupt transition from the lofty to the trivial, the serious to the silly, often undermining the intended emotional impact.
Bathos isn’t the same as pathos. Pathos moves us to sympathy or sorrow; bathos makes us smirk, sometimes at the author’s expense. And it can be either intentional (a deliberate comic or satirical device) or unintentional (a tonal misstep).
Before we look at American literature, it helps to see bathos in its original critical context. Pope’s Peri Bathous mocked poets who strained after epic grandeur but stumbled into the commonplace. For example, where Homer might describe warriors “like the leaves of autumn,” a poet in Pope’s crosshairs might compare them to “a shoal of herrings.” The juxtaposition produces a laugh—but not the one the poet intended.
Mock-epic poetry, from Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to Byron’s Don Juan, thrives on bathos: epic language describing trivial events. This deliberate form of bathos paved the way for its broader use in prose, drama, and even film.
American writers have often embraced bathos—sometimes to comic effect, sometimes as a subtle form of social commentary. Here are some memorable examples:
Twain wielded bathos like a scalpel. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck often follows a moment of earnest moral wrestling with something entirely mundane:
“Then I set to thinking, and the first thing you know I was crying a little. I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but just let it slide, and then I thought I’d go over and get some fish lines.”
The sudden turn from moral gravity to fishing gear undercuts the sentiment—but in Twain’s hands, it rings true to Huck’s character and pokes fun at human inconsistency.
Bathos in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby often emerges from the clash between Jay Gatsby’s epic self-image and the shallow world he inhabits. One of the most famous instances is Daisy Buchanan’s tearful reaction to Gatsby’s shirts:
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”
Here, the emotional charge is real, but the cause—shirts—feels absurd. Fitzgerald uses bathos to critique a society where longing for beauty is real, but the objects of desire are trivial.
Moby-Dick contains stretches of near-biblical grandeur—followed immediately by passages cataloging whale anatomy with painstaking (and faintly absurd) detail. Ishmael might meditate on the inscrutable mysteries of the sea, then spend pages describing the dimensions of a whale’s jawbone. Whether you read this as comic relief or obsessive realism, it’s a bathos that slows the epic sweep for something stubbornly prosaic.
In O’Connor’s short stories, moments of grace are often brought low by the grotesque or banal. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a tense confrontation with a killer is interrupted by a grandmother’s oddly irrelevant chitchat about watermelon, creating a jarring tonal drop. O’Connor’s bathos isn’t played for laughs; it’s unsettling, underscoring her view of human folly.
Wallace’s Infinite Jest often juxtaposes philosophical or existential digressions with painfully ordinary details—e.g., a character musing on the nature of human desire while trying to microwave a burrito. This deliberate bathos both grounds and undercuts his high-wire intellectualism.
Intentional bathos is a tool. A writer might use it to:
Unintentional bathos, by contrast, happens when a writer’s reach exceeds their grasp. A scene meant to stir the soul instead draws a chuckle, often because the detail or comparison is ill-chosen.
Consider an overwrought romance novel where a declaration of love ends with: “I will love you until the stars fall from the sky and my laundry is finally done.” The mismatch between grandeur and mundanity produces bathos—but unintentionally.
Bathos reminds us of the delicate balance in tone that literature demands. The line between tragedy and comedy is razor-thin; a single misplaced image can tip the scales. But bathos also mirrors life itself: profound moments are often interrupted by the everyday—an epic proposal followed by a phone buzzing, a funeral interrupted by a toddler’s shout.
When used with intent, bathos can bring literature closer to lived reality, grounding the sublime in the familiar. When it’s a misstep, it’s a lesson in the risks of aiming too high without a firm hand on the tonal wheel.
As you read, keep an eye out for bathos. Is the author winking at you, or did they just stumble? Either way, those moments where the high plunges into the low can be some of the most revealing—about the writer, the work, and ourselves.
Have you noticed a perfect (or perfectly bad) example of bathos in something you’ve read? Share it with us—we may feature it in a future post.