Fact vs Truth

Among the plethora and variety of literature, authors, and themes we read and discussed this week, one relatively minor reading stood out to me as particularlly interesting. I think the current debate regarding Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative is very important to not only his own story, but to literature as a whole. There have recently been questions brought up dealing with Equiano's early life history, and whether he was born in Africa, as he writes in his narrative, or if he was born directly into slavery in South Carolina. From a historical perspective, I believe this absolutely matters and more research should be done to find out the truth of this man's life. However, from a literary perspective, I think the emphasis on this question is missplaced, and is, as the Buddists would say, "a question wrongly asked."

One of the truly wonderful aspects of literature is its ability to transport the reader to places and into lives the have never, and will never experience themselves. In this way, reading and stories are very personal to the reader, and the feelings people are left with are the true essence of a book or narrative. Truth within literature does not equal exact fact. This idea is explained brilliantly in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, where the narrator says of writing a story about his experience in the Vietnam War,

" I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."

The narrator (and O'Brien himself) quite literally needed the reader to understand the context of what he was writing. This did not necessarily include the precise details and events that actually occured. What was more important was the true emotions and feelings of war and trauma not many people must ever go through. In this way, I believe these two seemingly incredibly different works of literature are actually quite similar, and have comparable motives of education and knowledge dispension.

Equiano's narrative, while perhaps not an exact re-telling of his life, was and still is important in American history and culture. Thousands of African Americans were stolen from their homes, and did take that awful journey across the Atlantic. I do not believe the author's possible absence from the experience negates the importance of telling society of this injustice through the written word. The truth of such stories lies not in factual background, but in the reader's reaction and changed views of the world. And if Equiano's chronicle of his kidnapping and plummet into slavery altered how anyone's, past or present, view of slavery, than it is, without a doubt, true.

As always, Tim O'Brien writes of this idea much more eloquently in The Things They Carried;

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth."