Friday, April 9, 2010
The effect fiction vs nonfiction
Concerning our class discussion this past Thursday i thought i would further explain how i feel on the A Million Little Pieces incident. I still find myself wondering how people could toss a book aside and all the emotions it brought out in them simply because it is non-fiction. I completely understand the betrayal by the author but that does not change the feelings it creates in people reading it. I feel we should take just as much from fiction as we do from non-fiction. We should use the fact that a book is fiction as an excuse to toss aside the feelings it may invoke in us. Those feelings could even be more powerful than those you would get out from reading non-fiction. I think it is because when we read non-fiction we are confronted with seeing what we can accomplish in our most vulnerable states and cant ignore that we too are capable of it but with fiction we can.
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I was in the middle of the book when all of the controversy came up, and everyone made fun of me for finishing it. However, it was one of those books I couldn't put down and it didn't affect the way I viewed the stories. The narrator already had me captivated and in my eyes, the public attention and slander didn't change his voice. Whether it was fiction or non-fiction, I needed to know what happened to the characters in the book without rethinking the way I felt through the story. Maybe this was because I went in thinking it was true, maybe not. However, in my attempts to protest Oprah and all of those who tore him apart for this, I bought his second book, "My Friend, Leonard" and never read it. I kept trying to read it but knowing that it was lies sold as the truth must have turned me off. I sold it at a garage sale for probably $1 the next year, however I still own "A Million Little Pieces" and I plan to read it again sometime in the future.
ReplyDeleteI think that people felt that if the author could lie to them about his story then their body and mind could lie to them about the things they felt while reading it. People have the ability to believe blindly in anything they choose and when something comes along that devistates or disproves their beliefs they are often left angry that they had invested so much into believing a lie. I thought of this story along the same lines of a movie that you watch for two hours just to find out the whole thing was the character's dream. The emotions you felt when watching were real while the dream was happening but at the end you find it hard to see the movie the same as you would have if it had been real events in the character's life. The outcome generally affects a person's overall attitude towards a piece of work.
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