Throughout the past week we have been discussing the truth of story telling. We have recently embraced the idea that the truth in storytelling is based on the emotions created within the text. As in Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, we feel as if the stories told are based on the emotions felt by O’Brien during his stay in Vietnam. This is to say that an author can convey truth solely based on the emotions he/she can create within his/her reader. In turn, this also creates a stronger connection between the happening truth and the story then creating truth based on more on the characters and situations used.
While the authors intent on creating truth is important. I think it is naïve not to look at the role the reader plays in this situation. There are times in which the reader may dive into a story that the writer intended to be fiction, and come out with something that, to them, is an inherent truth. Inevitably, there are also times in which an author’s truth is found by the reader to be a lie so far beyond the realm of possibility. This is an aspect of story telling that I think is extremely important to point out. If stories are built on a foundation of emotion, then won’t we all build different stories based on our own experiences and the emotions that we have felt through these experiences?
There are points in which the author is able to create emotions in the reader the way he intended to. I have never lost someone that is as close to me as Curt Lemon was to Rat Kiley, but I still seemed to feel the emotions he felt. O’Brien in this sense created a new emotion within me, filling the place that had never experienced a death like that. There are also points (in this book and others) that I find I am feeling emotions O’Brien never made a point to put in. This is where the reader interpretation of past experiences comes into play.
So now, for me, it has become even more confusing trying to sift between the truth the author makes within his text and the truths that we make ourselves from these texts.
I'd argue that the truths that we make for ourselves are vastly more important than the truths that O'Brien attempts to define for us. While it certainly is possible to consider what O'Brien attempts to instill within us, our own interpretations are what we can properly believe in. The idea of searching for the author's intent is an entirely hopeless pursuit and for many books I'd doubt that there is even one clear, concise intent that they write believing in. As readers, we have the ability to take a text and make it our own.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the power of any story is in the hands of the beholder. While the narrator believed that the torturing of the water buffalo was about love, most people believe it is about the destruction of war. Stories are subjective and each person can take from it what he or she desires. This applies to anything that happens too. Although two people witness the same events their brains may pick up and latch onto different details of it. Therefore no two perspectives are the same. This is the same as when we hear stories and tell stories. Everyone has different values and therefore when they hear a story may place emphasis on different aspects of the story. How many times have you asked a question after listening to a story and the storyteller goes "After that whole story THAT'S the detail you picked out? That's what you're worried about?" Conversely, how many times have you told a story and struggle to develop the perfect response in your reader, then finish with "Well, I guess you had to be there"?
ReplyDeleteI believe that the emotions we create within ourselves as the reader are what makes stories what they are. Stories are fabrications of events, whether true or not retold time after time again. Memory seems to fail us more often then not, and we rely on the emotion we felt to retell the story. Kurt is absolutely right when he states the claim that if all stories are built on the foundation of emotion, won't all stories be different due to the fact that all readers sense different emotions? And yes, nobody will tell one same story. The death of Keowa in the shit field may affect somebody who lost a family member in the service greater than somebody who is not directly affected by a similar story. Although we all feel grief, the levels of grief are different which will cause a different stories to be told.
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