But Is It True?

But Is It True? Whenever I read a piece written in the first person, sooner or later I ask the question, “Is it true?” It doesn’t have to be true. After all, a whole genre of fiction is based on what is called “the unreliable narrator”—Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Madman, Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Eudora Welty’s Why I Live at the P.O. Reading these narratives you realize, at some point, that the person who is telling the story is not to be trusted. Moreover, the narrator’s false nature contributes to your enjoyment of the story or novel. It is a fiction, and it is meant to be read as fiction. You, the reader, understand that whatever truth or wisdom is to be found in a work of this sort is set there obliquely through people who never lived but might have, or through seemingly improbable events that could, nevertheless, have taken place. The critical issue is that this work of fiction in all its shadowy luminescence reveals something important about life. There is, of course, a more complicated issue than the question of truth, namely, the degree of honesty with which a story is told. Truth implies a power beyond human comprehension and a capacity to know bordering on omnipotence. Science neither speaks of truth not asks for it. It does, however, expect its practitioners to report the data honestly, and it calls experiments that can be replicated, valid and reliable rather than true. The Karamazov brothers present in their fictional lives different attitudes about how life should be lived, and Dostoevsky pushes the huge stone of his unfinished novel up a very long hill to show us how these attitudes might play out. He pokes and prods at our ideas about how life should be lived, and he tells a good story along the way. Though fiction, The Brothers Karamazov is both honest and true—but the truth is fluid, and honesty, I think, should be treated less as a noun than an adjective, as in, “an honest effort.” In this case the effort produced a masterpiece, but whether because of the author’s

honesty (emotional, philosophical, spiritual) or other aspects of his brilliance is hard to say. The point is that to capture profound insights about life might be the goal of every writer. The point is, you can fulfill these intentions by inventing people and places and things and events, or you can, as Thoreau suggested, give a “simple, sincere account” of your own life. Nevertheless, when you say something actually happened, readers treat your writing differently, and for good reason. There is a great difference—all the difference in the world—between saying this is what life is like, and this is life. Most people can extrapolate from an example or see the connection in a metaphor, but when you say, “I overcame my drug addiction by doing this,” for the reader who wants to replicate that experience, it isn’t the same as saying, “I overcame my drug addiction by doing something like this.” It may be your memory is imperfect. That’s okay. Nobody expects you to be perfect. Moreover, we all know, or at least suspect, that your interpretation of what you think you remembered is also full of holes. There is, in fact, some entertainment value in an imperfect memory. It blurs the line between fact and fiction. David Cole Bay Tree Publishing www.baytreepublish.com