The Merriam- Webster dictionary defines fiction as “something invented from the imagination or feigned; an invented story.” In Michael Ondaatje’s “author’s note” from his novel Anil’s Ghost, he labels his work as a “fictional work” (Ondaatje 1) because he invented the characters and the events that occurred. However, his novel is set during a true “political time and historical moment,” (Ondaatje 1) which is the Sri Lankan Civil War. While he did create the characters, he did not create the war. His work may have been heavily inspired by the “similar events that took place” Ondaatje 1). To tell his story, he uses an omniscient narrative style, but provides the character of Anil to serve as his protagonist. Anil is a woman who originally lived …show more content…
In the Sri Lankan Civil War, the three sides were the LTTE, JVP and the government. However, in Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje refers to the groups as the separatist guerillas, the insurgents and the government respectively. According to Ryan Mowat, an author published in the Journal for Postcolonial Writing, using different names for the groups “instead of their well-known names betrays a reluctance to engage in the war.” In writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War, his goal is not to point out one side as being the “right” side. At one point of his novel, Sarath says, “What we’ve got here is unknown extrajudicial executions mostly. Perhaps by the insurgents, or by the government or the guerilla separatists. Murders committed by all sides” (18). Ondaatje shows that all people involved in the war are capable of violence, and all share an equal role in the destruction of humanity and the Sri Lankan country. According to Janet West, a professor of English, “Readers get a very clear sense of the danger and horror, but not a clear sense of where the violence is coming from” (West). Thus, because Ondaatje does not identify the perpetrators of the violence, he does not criticize any one side of the war, but rather war
In the fictional story the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne tells the story of a woman tormented by the townspeople for committing adultery. With fiction the author can paint a story in any way to deliver the right emotion to the audience. However, nonfiction must stay to the actual facts of the story. Typically, nonfiction stories contain eye-opening details that wouldn’t be believable if written as fiction. For example, the story of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were 2 olympic ice skating athletes trying to win gold. Tonya Harding had someone try to break Nancy Kerrigan’s legs so that she couldn’t compete. It is unbelievable as nonfiction, but as fiction it would seem too far out there to
... that turn ideological dispositions of hate into the physical violence inflicted on those that are supposedly representative for that loss. Not the leaders who are responsible for the conflict and involvement of belligerent sides, but simply representatives of the race or the nation participating in this conflict and “presumably responsible” in the death of the soldier.
No one knows what will happen in his or her life whether it is a trivial family dispute or a civil war. Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara are both child victims of war with extremely different life stories. Both of them are authors who have written about their first-hand experience of the truth of the war in order to voice out to the world to be aware of what is happening. Beah wrote A Long Way Gone while Kamara wrote The Bite of the Mango. However, their autobiographies give different information to their readers because of different points of view. Since the overall story of Ishmael Beah includes many psychological and physical aspects of war, his book is more influential and informative to the world than Kamara’s book.
What O’Brien sees as the purpose of the storytelling, and fictionalizing his experiences in Vietnam, can be seen through the “style” of his writing. It’s more than just a collection of stories. It’s a way for him to let go and start a new beginning. It is labeled “fiction” to make the story seem more engaging and to bring up the question, “Did this really happen?”
To say that historicity is of the utmost importance may seem extreme. Yet to understand a work, it is important to know if these were fantastic, yet true tales, or if they came from the mind of an author. Some may read a deeper significance into a fictional work. The fact that a story was ‘invented’ usually mean that it was created for a specific purpose. An author would be more prone to using certain literary devices, even in the story line, then fate, or whatever one believes creates the true stories. A completely fictional story may have more use of symbolism, and to search for the meaning of this symbolism, it might be important to know the environment in which it was written.
To introduce the conflict of this story, Danticat recounts the public execution of two rebels, Numa and Drouin, by the Haitian government. In doing so,
...se and no one in this book has super powers. There is also nothing about their situation that couldn’t happen to a person in real life. I think that the only thing that makes this story different from non-fiction is that it would not be as entertaining if it were real life events. It would be hard to think there would be this many twists to a real life story.
It is narrative because the author is recounting the stories of Christopher and Omar Khadr with an overall message/ lesson to end the essay.
A fact based story are stories about events that really happened and people who actually existed.
Michael F. Holt, in his article The Political Divisions That Contributed to Civil War, argued the American Civil War was caused by the breakdown of the two-party political system, which generated a local loss of faith in the entire political system, justifying the creation of a new political system in the South. It was the agency of individuals attempting to solve their political grievances. While Bruce Levine, in his article The Economic Divisions That Contributed to Civil War, maintained unresolvable economic divisions between North and South made the Civil War inevitable, as the two different economies could not indefinitely coexist. While the conflicting economies of the North and the South played a major role in fashioning the war,
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o...
Is it possible for a fictional novel to have the characteristic elements to make the reader believe that it is nonfiction? In the novel, Bleachers by John Grisham, we witness a disoriented former high school all-star quarterback make a return to his hometown after many years as he tries to figure out the feelings he has for his former Coach. The novel takes place in a small town called Messina, where the biggest events to happen are high school football on a Friday night. Other than Spartan football, the small populated, Messina does not have much going for them besides hearing about the latest news and gossip spread with the locals. Neely Crenshaw is the main character focused in the story. A once high school hero for breaking quarterback records and accumulating wins for the Spartans, decides whether if it is right to keep a grudge or be thankful from his passing coach, Eddie Rake. Eddie Rake is the reason why Spartan football was put on the map. His intense and unorthodox practice turned students into actual Spartans of football. He is also the reason many former Spartan football players have returned, including Neely because he has been in severe condition due to cancer. As the players reminisce on realistic events and moments of state games, they also await for the lights to shut off on Rake’s Field. The believable context of this fictional novel has a convincing setting, theme, characters, and events that make readers believe the possibility in real life.
Violence marks much of human history. Within the sociopolitical sphere, violence has continually served as a tool used by various actors to influence and/or to control territory, people, institutions and other resources of society. The twentieth century witnessed an evolution of political violence in form and in scope. Continuing into the twenty-first, advances in technology and social organization dramatically increase the potential destructiveness of violent tools. Western colonialism left a world filled with many heterogeneous nation-states. In virtually all these countries nationalist ideologies have combined with ethnic, religious, and/or class conflicts resulting in secessionist movements or other kinds of demands. Such conflicts present opportunities for various actors in struggles for wealth, power, and prestige on both national and local levels. This is particularly evident in Indonesia, a region of the world that has experienced many forms of political violence. The state mass killings of 1965-66 mark the most dramatic of such events within this region. My goal is to understand the killings within a framework of collec...
Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body and the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him.
Now here’s the essential difference between fiction and non-fiction. The Fruit War’s setting is real, but the story and the characters are not. Most of the “characters” are composite, a combination of two or more people I have known. I have taken elements from these past acquaintances and synthesized each of them into a new person just like Victor Frankenstein had done with his monster.