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Fiction
And the Nature of Truth
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The Paradox, Part 1
Overheard in conversation:
“I wouldn’t believe a word he says. His stories of his encounters with women are pure fiction.”
Question:
What does the listener think of “him”?
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Answer
The listener thinks he can’t be trusted to tell the truth, at least as far as his relationships with women are concerned.
The listener thinks his stories are “fiction.”
The listener thinks they are LIES.
BUT . . .
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The Paradox, Part 2
Overheard in a classroom:
“Fiction is one of the major ways we communicate important truths.”
Question: How can “fiction” mean both truth and lies?
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Answer
Fiction may not BE the truth, but it TELLS the truth. At least GOOD fiction does.
How can that be?
The first answer has to do with INTENT.
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The Question of Intent
Good fiction, that is to say literary fiction, is storytelling that comes from the writer’s imagination. The writer intends to entertain or reveal or amuse. Unlike our first overheard speaker, fiction does not pretend to be reality, nor is the writer’s intention to deceive us.
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The Paradox, Part 3
And yet
While the truths of fiction are not literal, the story may contain factual truth.
From your experience with fiction, explain how that can be.
And fiction sometimes uses untruths or bends the literal truth to tell a larger, more all-encompassing truth.
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The Lies of Fiction
Plot
Characters
Setting
Language
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How Plot “Lies”
Plot is a sequence of caused events, though not necessarily either chronological or external to the characters. Plot contains what moves itself forward, eliminating the extraneous and distracting details of reality.
The literary fiction writer bends narrative in a way that life, itself, is never bent. The story begins, continues, and closes in a shape driven fundamentally by causality and limited to the events described and presented by the author. Life has no such limits and rarely such a clear shape.
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10. Classroom Activity: Plot
Using a text you have read for class, identify the events of the story or novel or play and identify how these events are linked by cause or necessity.
Then discuss how, in real life, these events would be supplemented by intervening or alternate events.
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How Characters “Lie”
The simplest distinction between real people and literary characters is what literary characters don’t do. ( You can let your imagination supply some of what’s missing, if you like, but you could never fill in everything.)
The author who creates literary characters selects details of conversation, action, and influence to build an image of a person.
The selection of details the author uses to create characters is purposeful. That is, each detail says something or means something of significance in the story.
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12. Classroom Activity: Character
Choose a character from a text you are reading. Make a list of details that you know about this character. Discuss how each detail is purposeful—that is, helps the reader understand the character and his or her situation in life. Then consider what the story would be missing if some of the details were changed or eliminated.
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How Setting “Lies”
In a really good book, you can just BE there in your mind.
But not really. Even when your imagination is full of the place of the story—its weather, its flora and fauna, its buildings and monuments, its crowds or its isolation— you’re only getting part of the picture.
But what a part! Setting, like plot and characters, is purposeful. It moves forward the plot or influences the characters or establishes the tone or contributes to the theme. In literary fiction, the setting is not just wallpaper!
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14. Classroom Activity: Setting
Identify the setting of the text you are studying. But sure to identify time (time of day or time of year or even decade or century) as well as place. Be very specific. Then, discuss the significance of the setting to the actions of the characters, to their beliefs and assumptions, to the choices they make, and to the relationships they develop, ignore, or cultivate.
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15. The “Lies” of Language
Nothing lies better than language. Or more powerfully. Or with greater purpose. Consider the sentences that open a few masterful stories.

16. From “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat.”
Hyperbole. A thousand injuries? Who’s counting?
Point of view. The speaker addresses us readers and assumes that we know the nature of his soul. In doing so, the speaker calls us in to witness the story intimately and presumably sympathetically. (The plan backfires.)
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17. From “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” by Flannery O’Connor
“’Now look here, Bailey,’ she said, ‘see here, read this,’ and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. ‘Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people.’”
Dialogue. Well it might be true that the woman said these words. But there’s an even greater truth revealed—she is stubborn and single-minded, and she speaks in grammatically incorrect sentences. In these few line, she already seems annoying.
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Back to the Paradox
In the very greatest literary fiction, writers use a variety of devices which may, indeed, distort a literal truth. But these devices of Plot, Character, Setting, and Language work in the service of far greater truths, truths about the human condition, our joys and sorrows, our disappointments and our private glee. The stories we read by the great authors may be “fiction” in the sense of “made up,” but they also tell the truths that show us who we are and who we may hope to be.
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