The goal of class that day was to discuss strategies to transform an autobiographical experience into a piece of fiction—as well as why one would do this—why transform experience and not just write memoir.
Despite the fact that I had introduced The Things They Carried as a novel, I had a feeling that many of my students had read “On the Rainy River” as a true story, that they believed that, like the narrator of the story, the author Tim O’Brien had fled his hometown in Minnesota the summer of 1968 after receiving a draft notice, driving to the northern most part of the state, just across the border from Canada, where, at the Tip Top Lodge, he debated for a week whether to defect.
I had this hunch because I myself had thought the story was true for a long time—had certainly thought this the first time I’d read it in Dr. Castaldo’s class my junior year of high school. But in the years since, as I had begun to write fiction myself, I realized that much of the fiction I believed to be true was, in fact, made up. O’Brien did not drive to northern Minnesota the summer of 1968. He didn’t go to the Tip Top Lodge. He didn’t meet a man named Elroy. They didn’t go fishing, and O’Brien did not consider jumping out of the boat and swimming to Canada to evade the draft.
O’Brien had confirmed this in a 1991 interview in the Missouri Review:
It's a dramatization of what I felt during the summer of 1968: a kind of moral schizophrenia. Like the Tim O'Brien in the book, I believed the war was wrong and thought that the morally correct thing to do was to flee, to run from it, or else go to jail. But another side of my personality, like the character in the book, felt a kind of gravity pulling me toward the war. The drama of the story, the facts about that character going to the river, meeting somebody, and almost crossing into Canada, were all invented. It was kind of a dramatic enactment of what had been an old, old daydream on my part.
I was excited to show my students this interview, to reveal to them that “On the Rainy River” was not factually true; it only felt true. I was excited to show them that they could do this too—take a real-life experience and spin it into a story just as convincing but more captivating than real life.
“Who is Tim O’Brien?” I began.
The students gave me, and each other, confused looks. I waited.
“The guy in the story?” a student asked.
I nodded, but said nothing.
“The author?” another student guessed. “But are they the same person?”
The students looked around at each other.
Then my favorite student—every teacher has one—spoke up. “No,” she said. “There’s Tim O’Brien the author, and Tim O’Brien the character.”
“Good,” I said. “So did Tim O’Brien the author flee the draft?”
Silence.
“Did he go to the Tip Top Lodge? Was there a guy named Elroy? Did he almost swim to Canada?”
“No,” she said.
“Good. Now how many of you, when you first read this story, took it to be a true story?”
No one raised their hand.
“I think I probably did when I first read this story in high school,” I added, standing up. “Anyone else?”
At this, a student raised his hand. The rest of the class followed.
We all had committed what Zadie Smith calls 'The Autobiographical Error'—when readers mistake fiction writers’ characters/narrators for the authors themselves.
We all had committed what Zadie Smith calls “The Autobiographical Error”—when readers mistake fiction writers’ characters/narrators for the authors themselves. Smith herself admits that she often makes this error: “I confuse Portnoy with Roth, and Humbert with Nabokov and Janie with Zora Neal Hurston,” she writes in her essay “The ‘I’ Who Is Not Me.”
The Autobiographical Error has no doubt become even more common in the last decade with the resurgence of autofiction. I say “resurgence,” because, as others have pointed out, people have been writing autofiction for ages; early examples might include Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890) and À la Recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust (1913).
In The Story of Me, one of the few works of criticism devoted to autofiction, Marjorie Worthington reviews previous criticism and finds three different definitions of autofiction that fall along a spectrum of fictionality. The first definition, from Serge Doubrovsky, refers to any text that is referential—that is, drawing on real life events. He used “autofiction” the same way that we use the term “memoir” today, which reflects his understanding that any text that claims or aims to be referential is inherently fictional. The second definition Worthington uncovers, from the critic Vincent Colonna, defines autofiction as a hybrid genre, a mix of fiction and nonfiction. And the third definition, which she takes from Gerard Genette, includes works that are the most fictionalized. Genette differentiates “'true autofictions,' 'whose narrative content is, if I may say so, authentically fictional' from 'false autofictions, which are 'fictions' only for legal purposes: in other words veiled autobiographies.'" It is this third definition that Worthington adapts, and she has three criteria: autofiction must be “clearly fictional,” there must be an onomastic relationship between the author and narrator/protagonist, i.e. these two must share a name, and the work must engage questions of authorship.
I disagree that autofiction must be “clearly fictional.” To me, autofiction is often the opposite: it’s unclear from the text alone whether it is fictional or not. To me, autofiction is any fictional text that encourages an autobiographical reading, that encourages readers to commit the Autobiographical Error.
Smith links “The Autobiographical Error” to “The Reality Effect,” a reference to an essay by Roland Barthes by the same title. In this essay, Barthes notes the presence in realistic Western narrative of certain “useless details” that are “a kind of narrative luxury” from the point of view of structure. One of his examples is from the story “A Simple Heart” by Flaubert: “an old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons." Barthes notes that the piano might tell the reader about the owners’ “bourgeois standing” and the boxes and cartons might indicate the family’s “lapse in status” but that the barometer tells us nothing. It is a “useless detail” that cannot be accounted for structurally. What is the use of these useless details? Barthes asks. They produce what Barthes terms “the reality effect.” He writes:
Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door, say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified… the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.
In other words, these “useless details” make realism feel real.
Smith observes that the reality effect can be produced by other means. “It utilizes the flesh-and-blood self, mining it for information, stripping it for parts and re-presenting it,” she writes. Smith notes that Philip Roth was particularly skillful at producing the reality effect in this manner: “Roth’s singular achievement was to use his reader’s erroneous beliefs about the relationships between characters and their authors as one of his literary effects.” But how? What techniques do authors employ to produce the reality effect, and, more specifically, to lead readers to commit “The Autobiographical Error”?
What techniques do authors employ to produce the reality effect, and, more specifically, to lead readers to commit 'The Autobiographical Error'?
Smith observes that she makes “The Autobiographical Error,” most often when the story is told in the first-person. This then is the first strategy of writing fiction that feels real, of producing “The Reality Effect”: a first-person point of view.
Smith notes the difference in the amount of work a writer must do to convince their reader of the story’s reality in the third-person versus the first-person point of view. The former raises so many questions: “Once upon a when, exactly? Where? Who were these people? Why are you telling me about them? On what authority do you tell me this story?” Smith imagines a reader asking.
“Now compare that to: Something happened to me yesterday. The Reality Effect is so strong, so immediate,” she writes.
Let’s look at the opening lines of “On the Rainy River”: “This is one story I’ve never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife,” O’Brien writes.
The Reality Effect is strong. But it’s not just the first-person that creates this effect. It’s the narrator’s confession that this is a story that’s been difficult to tell. The idea that the story is shameful makes the story feel real—because if it’s not true, the reader thinks, then why would the narrator bother to tell it? Why say you did something shameful that you did not do? The only reason to tell about a shameful act, we might think, is to get it off your chest, to relieve yourself of guilt or shame. This is precisely what the narrator says he is trying to do: “For more than twenty years I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper I’m hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams.” So we believe that the story is true because the narrator says it is true and because he says it is difficult to tell.
So you’ve decided to write in the first-person. But now what will you call this narrator?
The most obvious way of encouraging readers to mistake the narrator for the author is to give them what Worthington calls an “onomastic relationship.” O’Brien of course does this in The Things They Carried. Other famous examples include How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, and 10:04 by Ben Lerner. More recent examples I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins and The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Mahoney. An extension of this technique is for the authors to include photographs of themselves in the text (Motherhood by Sheila Heti) or have their narrators describe photos of themselves that match the author’s appearance (Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler).
A less bold choice is to leave the narrator unnamed. This is a favorite move of Sigrid Nunez, who does so in several of her novels, including The Friend and What Are You Going Through and her most recent novel The Vulnerables. Lydia Davis also leaves her narrators unnamed. Though the narrator is unnamed, the reader notices parallels between the author and the narrator—often they are both writers and share biographical details—and may conclude they are one and the same, though they are not. As Nunez says in her Paris Review interview: “For the most part, the experiences the narrators have are not taken from my life.” Perhaps this is precisely why Nunez leaves the narrators unnamed—they are both her and not her.
Smith’s point is that any first-person story produces a Reality Effect, but an even stronger Reality Effect is produced by a first-person retrospective narrator, like the one in “On the Rainy River.” With a retrospective narrator, there is a chronological gap between what critic Dorrit Cohn, in her book Transparent Minds, calls “the narrating self”—the “I” telling the story—and “the experiencing self”—the “I” experiencing the events of the story. Cohn terms this kind of first-person narration “dissonant self-narration.”
Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu is her prime example of such narration. Throughout Swann’s Way, the narrator Marcel distances his present self from his past self in several ways, as Cohn illustrates. One way is that he offers summaries of his past inner life over an extended period of time. The narrator of “On the Rainy River” does this too when he describes his state of mind the summer of 1968:
It was a kind of schizophrenia. A moral split. I couldn’t make up my mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me... At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d sometimes carry on fierce arguments with [supporters of the war]. I’d be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand.
Cohn notes that such summaries “are dependent on a distanced and discerning eye.” In other words, offering such insights requires a narrator who can see the character quite well. Such summaries require a depth of knowledge that appears to stem from personal experience. Thus, they might suggest that the author is the same as the narrating self, producing the Reality Effect.
Cohn also notes that when Marcel renders his reactions in specific moments, he constantly “[moves] back and forth in time… [dissecting], and [elucidating].” At times, he “draws attention… to his own narrating self at its present post of observation.” For example, while recounting the first time he glimpsed the renowned Duchesse de Guermantes as a young boy, the narrator interrupts to say: “And the attention with which I illuminated her face isolated it so completely that today if I think back to this ceremony, I find it impossible to visualize a single person who was present, except for her.”
O’Brien’s narrator makes virtually the same move when he recalls seeing Elroy for the first time: “Even after two decades I can close my eyes and return to that porch at the Tip Top Lodge. I can see the old guy staring at me. Elroy Berdahl: eighty-one years old, skinny and shrunken and mostly bald.” This is one of the clearest moments of the narrator drawing attention to “his own narrating self at its present post of observation,” but the narrator makes this move throughout the story, often with just the subtle inclusion of the phrase “I remember.” Turn to almost any page in “On the Rainy River,” and you’ll find it riddled with “I remember”s.
Why do these distancing techniques create the Reality Effect? Cohn notes that "[The relationship between the narrating and experiencing selves] imitates the temporal continuity of real beings, an existential relationship that differs substantially from the purely functional relationship that binds a narrator to his protagonist in third-person fiction.” In other words, reminders that the experiencing self is different from the narrating self paradoxically reminds the reader that the experiencing self and the narrating self are the same self. The character within the story is the same person as the narrator of the novel, who readers are likely to mistake, or read, as the author.
Every time O’Brien’s narrator moves back and forth in time, calling attention to the distance—or similarity—between his present 43-year-old self and his 21-year-old self in 1968 (“It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why”) he is asserting a continuity of character—an identity between the narrating and experiencing selves.
Every time he narrates his process of recollection, when he writes “I remember” or “What I remember more than anything else is…” or “Looking back after twenty years…” the narrator is asserting that this story is being pulled from his memory, which is to say that it is true. This feeling of authenticity is paradoxically augmented when he admits that he can’t remember the whole story. Statements like “I’m not sure how I made it through those six days. Most of it I can’t remember” make the story feel true because the reader knows this is how memory is: fallible. We forget some things, and we remember others. If the narrator were to act like he remembered the whole six days, the story would be less convincing.
The significance of these multiple temporal frames—the narrating self in the present, the experiencing self in the past—in the autobiographical reading of a text is underscored by examining an autobiographical text that lacks the use of such retrospection. Take The Souvenir, a film about an aspiring filmmaker named Julie in a relationship with a heroin addict. “The film is obsessively autobiographical,” writes Rebecca Mead in her New Yorker profile of the filmmaker Joana Hogg:
It was shot on an inch-by-inch reconstruction of Hogg’s elegant student digs—a pied-à-terre that her parents kept in Knightsbridge. The set was furnished with objects from Hogg’s youth, including an ornate antique French bed that she and her lover had bought, for a hundred pounds, at auction in 1982. Hogg found old letters and incorporated them into the film.
But the viewer would never know the extent to which the film is autobiographical from watching the movie. The only hint is that the film is about a filmmaker. This is because, as Richard Brody points out in his review of the film, “Hogg’s proximity to her earlier self seems complete and total; there’s no cinematic device to suggest a present-tense filmmaker reaching back to an earlier stage of her own life and art.” To put this into the terms we’ve been using, there is no distance between the narrating and experiencing self; in fact, there is no narrating self, only experiencing self. “Hogg,” Brody continues, “never dramatizes her access to the elements of her inner life or any struggle for engagement with it. The film offers no sense of searching for memories or grasping at its details or its import.” For Brody this is a problem because it’s a movie about memory in which there is no grasping for the past. “On the Rainy River” is also in some ways about memory—about the shame that lingers years after certain experiences. Because the reader knows that the narrator ultimately goes to Vietnam, they are not reading this story for plot, or for “what” happens in the story, we are reading to understand the “why” of the story: why he goes to Vietnam: shame. The narrating self, or retrospective narrator, underscores this aboutness: twenty years have passed, and he’s still ashamed.
But while Proust “draws attention…to his own narrating self at its present post of observation,” as Cohn writes, O’Brien takes this even further: he shows the reader the narrator at work on the very book we are reading, which my former professor Chris Bachelder and I, in conversations about O’Brien and similar texts, termed a “situated narrator.”
The first time this situated narrator comes into The Things They Carried, he says: “I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words…” The reader, seeing the narrating self undertake to write the novel we are about to read, is encouraged to read the narrator of the book as the author of the book.
This move is mirrored decades later in My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Twenty-five pages into the novel, he writes: “As I sit here writing this, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed.... Today is the twenty-seventh of February. The time is 11:43 p.m. I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing I am thirty-nine years old.” Notice that Knausgaard goes even further than O’Brien, offering more details about the present from which he writes. He even tells us what he sees as he writes: “In the window before me I can vaguely make out the reflection of my face. Apart from one eye, which is glistening, and the area immediately beneath, which dimly reflects a little light, the whole of the left side is in shadow.” The present is rendered in as much detail as the past sections we’ve just read; the narrator becomes real to us, enhancing the credibility of his story, the sense that the narrator and the author are the same.
In the Knausgaard, as in many other novels, the situated writer appears only at the beginning of the text. The early autofictional text Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick opens: "It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.” A more contemporary example, Sight by Jessie Greengrass, starts similarly: "The start of another summer, the weather uncertain but no longer sharply edged, and I am pregnant again. In front of me is all the ordinary and useful disarrangement of my desk…"
In both novels, the situated narrator largely disappears after these initial glimpses. The author only needs to call attention to the narrating self writing once to suggest an identity between this narrator and herself, the author, and thus produce a Reality Effect.
In contrast, other novels feature a situated narrator throughout the book. In Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan, the narrator’s writing process is a part of the plot. After her mother commits suicide, she initially resists writing about her mother but can’t let go of the impulse. She decides to write a book about her mother that includes the story of her trying to write it: “One morning I got up and decided that I had to write…The book would perhaps be no more than that: the account of that quest, containing within it its own genesis…” Thus, throughout the rest of the book, as she reconstructs the story of her mother’s life, the reader sees the narrator reflecting on the writing process. The deeper into the story she gets, the harder it is for her to continue, and she has to give herself pep talks of sorts: “I am writing this book because I now have the strength to examine what troubles and sometimes assails me…because I want to know what I am passing on. I want to stop being afraid…” These sections introduce tension into a book that might otherwise lack it, spanning, as it does, decades, and lacking a plot; they raise the question: Will the narrator finish the book?
Lydia Davis makes a similar move in The End of the Story, but being Davis, she of course makes it weirder. The novel consists of two threads woven together: one part tells the story of an unnamed “I”’s love affair with an unnamed man; the other part is about a writer writing a novel that sounds very much like the story we are reading in the other part, but it’s never made clear whether this is the case. The novel opens with the first thread, describing the last time the “I” attempted to see her ex-lover. There is then a section break and an asterisk and then the writing picks up again: “This seemed to be the end of the story, and for a while it was the end of the novel… Then I put it at the beginning of the novel, as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest.” What is the point of this second thread? The narrating self seems to be doing exactly what Richard Brody wanted from The Souvenir. In the second thread, the reader sees the narrator reaching back into the past and struggling to construct a story out of it. The reader sees the process of memory dramatized, but these memories are not just retrieved, they are manipulated. Which brings me back to…
Many writers beyond Barthes have noted the importance of detail to making fiction convincing (see The Art of Fiction by John Gardner), but I want to point out how antithetical this is to the way memory actually works.
In the first episode of the seminal podcast Serial, the host Sarah Koenig reflects on the difficulty of remembering in detail. She says that if she’s learned one thing from reporting on the murder of Hae Min Lee for a year, it’s that “It’s really hard to account for your time, in a detailed way I mean.” She asks the listener: “How’d you get to work last Wednesday for instance? Drive, walk, bike? Was it raining? Are you sure? Did you go in any stores that day? If so, what did you buy? Who did you talk to? The entire day, name every person you talked to. It’s hard!” The listener agrees, and yet when a first-person narrator tells us a detailed account of something from the past, we believe those details; they produce the Reality Effect rather than undermine it.
Some details, of course, we do remember. As Koenig points out in Serial, we remember days when something significant happened far better than other days. Thus, it’s believable that, more than twenty years later, the narrator of “On the Rainy River” recalls the exact date and time he received his draft notice—June 17, 1968—and recalls that day in detail: what the weather was, what he was doing: “It was a humid afternoon, I remember, cloudy and very quiet, and I’d just come in from a round of golf.”
But we forget the details of most days. As Koenig notes, “If nothing significant happened, then the answers get very general… I most likely did this, I most likely did that.” O’Brien knows this and thus not all the days of the summer of 1968 are detailed. When the narrator begins thinking about ditching the draft, O’Brien is much more vague on the timing: “At some point in mid-July I began thinking seriously about Canada.” If O’Brien had recalled the exact date and time he’d started to think about going to Canada, that might have whiffed of artifice.
But there are other details in the story that the narrator could not possibly remember 20 years later. Most notably, the direct dialogue. How could the narrator possibly remember verbatim what he said to Elroy twenty years ago? Smith writes about the artificiality of dialogue even in “true” stories, like My Struggle: “I’m afraid I do not believe that Karl Ove Knausgaard miraculously remembers conversations from his childhood when I know I could not precisely reconstruct a conversation I had yesterday with my husband. It’s all writing.” Smith’s point is that even in a text that the author claims is all “true,” the dialogue is made-up. Readers know this from our own experiences trying to recall past conversations, and yet, when we read we forget this; we read the dialogue as “true”; it produces the Reality Effect.
The dialogue in “On the Rainy River” is too precise to be believable, and yet it is. Similarly, other details in the story are too convenient, too suited to the thematics of the story to be believable, and yet they are. Take a look at how the narrator describes the fictional Tip Top Lodge:
The place was in sorry shape. There was a dangerous wooden dock, an old minnow tank, a flimsy tar paper boathouse along the shore. The main building, which stood in a cluster of pines on high ground, seemed to lean heavily to one side, like a cripple, the roof sagging toward Canada.
The Tip Top Lodge feels real because the narrator has described it in detail. But on closer inspection, the detail is too good. The lodge, which could be considered metonymy for Elroy, “[leans] heavily to one side”; it “[sags] towards Canada,” just as Elroy seems to be on the side of the narrator fleeing to Canada (we see this when he takes the narrator out fishing, and when he disappears after the narrator has made his choice to return home).
This detail is similar to the details about the narrator’s summer job. He could work at a root beer stand or as a caddy at the golf course, but he doesn’t; he works in a meatpacking plant as a “Declotter,” constantly showered in pig blood. The horrors of this job mirror the horror that awaits him in Vietnam. The narrator even acknowledges this: “In the evenings I’d sometimes borrow my father’s car and drive aimlessly around town…thinking about the war and the pig factory and how my life seemed to be collapsing toward slaughter.” Why don’t these details, which so nicely echo the ideas in the story, sound alarm bells for the reader?
In How Fiction Works, James Wood recounts Barthes’ essay on the reality effect and answers Barthes’ question about the significance of these insignificant details. These superfluous details contribute to a feeling of realism, Wood writes, because “life is full of surplus detail.” The details I’ve noted in “On the Rainy River” are not as irrelevant or superfluous as they may seem at first, but this idea might help us understand why the details in the story contribute to the Reality Effect: life is full of odd detail, and so we accept it in fiction.
By now we have established that O’Brien uses many techniques to assert an identity between himself and his narrator/character. He seems to be encouraging readers to make “The Autobiographical Error.”
But something strange happens three-quarters of the way through The Things They Carried. In a section entitled “Good Form,” the narrator asserts that he is separated from the experiencing self not just by time and wisdom, but by fact. The narrator tells us that everything that we’ve read up to this point, while it may seem true, is made up. In “Style,” he recounts the story of killing a man, but in “Good Form,” he admits this was fabricated. “But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough,” the narrator writes. In other words, he felt like he killed the man, and he writes a story in which he kills him because: “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” Here, the narrator insists that what he has told us is not factually true (it is not “happening truth,” as he calls it), but nevertheless he believes it to be truer than reality. That is, he believes that this story better communicates the emotional truth, or how he felt and continues to feel.
Somehow this admission doesn’t undermine the Reality Effect, it augments it. How can this possibly be? How can it be that when the narrator tells us that the stories we’ve read aren’t true, we still think they’re true? The admission of flaws, of lies in the case of O’Brien’s narrator, somehow makes one seem more credible.
Davis makes a similar move in The End of the Story; her unnamed narrator reflects: “I see that I'm shifting the truth around a little, at certain points accidentally, but at others deliberately. I am rearranging what actually happened so that it is not only less confusing and more believable, but also more acceptable or palatable.” But for the most part, she asserts, it’s true: “I'm not willing to invent very much. Most things are kept as they were. Maybe I can't think what to put in place of the truth. Maybe I just have a poor imagination." This admission that some of the story has been fictionalized, ironically, adds to its feeling of authenticity, its lack of artifice. Davis fictionalizes because she wants to make the story “less confusing and more believable”; again, Davis is admitting that in order to create the Reality Effect—to make things seem true—she must lie. As with O’Brien, this admission only enhances the Reality Effect.
What is O’Brien getting at here? Why does he simultaneously create the Reality Effect, encouraging readers to make “The Autobiographical Error,” and undermine it?
O’Brien, as I know from research and from his novel In the Lake of the Woods, is interested in magic; so we might read his creation of the Reality Effect as a magic trick. Look, I fooled you. I made you think all this was true, but it ain’t. But is that all this is—a demonstration of his mastery? The narrator denies this: “It’s not a game. It’s a form.” He is trying to say something about the power of stories, of fiction. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth,” the narrator writes in “Good Form.” Fiction, through the Reality Effect, enables readers to understand what experiences truly felt like (“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present”). That’s a powerful tool for protesting unjust wars.
But he also seems to be showing the dark side of stories—how we can be led to believe stories that harm—just as his neighbors in “On the Rainy River” have been told a story about the Vietnam War that they believed to be true: “it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things.”
The creation of the Reality Effect through various techniques, including the narrator’s assertion of the stories’ truth, and then the subsequent revelation that these stories are not true, warns readers that just because something feels true does not mean that it is true. Often, this is an effect—one that can be used for good as well as evil.
Beware.
Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. University of California Press, 1989.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Princeton University Press, 1978.
Davis, Lydia. The End of the Story. Picador, 1995.
De Viga, Delphine. Nothing Holds Back the Night. Bloomsbury, 2014.
Greengrass, Jessie. Sight. Hogarth, 2018.
Hardwick, Elizabeth. Sleepless Nights. New York Review of Books, 1979.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Broadway Books, 1998.
Smith, Zadie. Feel Free. Penguin, 2018.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. Picador, 2008.
Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. Brandies University Press, 2015.
Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of “Me.” University of Nebraska, 2018.
