Truth in Literature Essay Example for Free

Truth in Literature Essay The truth provides different functions to different people. Truth to some people is simply boring so they choose to alter it as much as possible. This is also known as lying. Others try to run away from it, they simply cannot deal with reality. Some even go to the extreme by living their while life as a lie, while trying to deceive others. The truth in literature, as I perceive it, is something that only the reader can decide as being fact or fiction. There is neither right nor wrong to the information you obtain. The option is in your hands, and you are the one who should decide eventually if what you read or hear is fact, fiction, valuable, important, or useful for your future. Marta Martin may have omitted certain emotions or occurrences in order to appear stronger and more heroic to a reader. Richard Rodriguez lied to himself throughout his life in order to make himself believe he was better than his past. Finally, W. D. Snodgrass lied to everyone around him and even to himself, while chasing female students, in order to maintain an appearance of an upstanding professor. The story of Marta Martin can be very strange to some, but others can see her as a hero. Marta Martin was a pregnant woman who found herself caught in a terrible storm in the middle of Alaska. She was forced to survive on her own and there was no one else to help her. Marta kept a diary where she described how she managed to survive. In her diary she described a day when she killed a sea otter with an ax, peeled his skin, and ate his liver and heart. When you read her story you try to imagine a woman doing all that, but it gets harder when you realize that most pregnant women find even the smallest chores difficult. I tried to imagine a woman, but all I could invision was a man. What is even more interesting is that there was no emotion mentioned in the diary. There were no complaints, or pain, and she never mentioned the fact that she might be scared staying at the house all alone with her baby due very soon. She wrote about events that required emotional strength and physical characteristics not common to a young pregnant woman. Marta never once mentioned fear or apprehension that I feel even a man might feel in those circumstances. Many who read her story would be astonished to think that she accomplished all that alone. Many others will consider her a liar. In the beginning of her story she mentioned the reason as to why she choose to tell her story I can hardly write, but I must. For two reasons: first I am afraid I may never live to tell my story, and second, I must do something to keep my sanity. (martin,301) I believe she wrote the story not because she wanted to keep her sanity. Clearly she had plenty of work to do before the baby came, but she chose to write her story so that no one will forget her, so that everyone who will read this story sees her as a hero. A woman who did what would be impossible for most women out there. I dont know Marta Martin, though somewhere in my heart I believe that the truth is quite different. The truth is, that as a woman, she must have been scared and lonely. Im sure that she had many nights she found herself crying and praying for help. The truth, as I see it , is that there is no woman in this world who can kill an animal , get trapped in snow storm, live all by herself pregnant, and not mention a word of fear . However, it is not up to me to tell the truth. I’m simply the person who read it, and chooses to accept it, or interpret it differently. Marta Martin wanted to remain a hero. She wanted everyone to remember her as a hero. And with all that she did, that woman is a hero with or without mentioning a word or two of fear. The truth might be far different than what she chose to portray in her diary, but the fact is that she did survive, she did kill the sea otter and peel his skin, and she did have her baby. Thats the truth. What happened in between is her choice to tell us, and it is our responsibility to accept it or not. Richard Rodriguez altered the truth in a different way than Marta Martin and for a different purpose. Rodriguez was boy who wanted to be different from his middle class immigrant family. As a child Richard read as many books as he could, he used to always be the one to answer teacher’s questions and soon became smarter then his siblings and even his parents. His family couldnt really understand why he was so fascinated in reading books all the time and his brothers and sisters used to make fun of him. Even the other pupils in the class did not like him since he was the smart one. Later on, when it came time to choose a college, he chose the one far from home, far from his family. By then, he was embarrassed by his family’s lack of education and attempted to isolate himself as much as possible. In college he did very well and when he used to come back home he had nothing to share with his family. He thought that they would not understand anyhow, so why even bother. In the end the author wrote the truth about the typical school boy, in the end Rodriguez came to face the painful truth. He realized that in attempting to run from the past, run from his family, he lost something so profound and important that no matter how hard he would attempt to restore it, he would not succeed. He became more nostalgic for what was never really there, and for the thoughts of what might have been. Rodriguez was attempting to escape his family, but in doing so he faced the truth that in his heart he actually desired to be closer to his family. His goal was to become educated and felt that educated people were more admired. What he learned was all memorized; he did not learn intuition, creativity, interpretation, or how to solve complex problems. â€Å"Faithfully I wrote down all that they said. I memorized it:† I heard it all. But there was no way for any of it to mean very much to me. † (Rodriguez,670) W. D. Snodgrass lied to everyone around him and even to himself and reflects on this in a poem called â€Å"April inventory†, where an old man give the reader a glance of his life as a teacher. Through that window we discover information that some will consider as inappropriate, or even disturbing. His reality is far from been normal to me, yet he consider it as been of his everyday life. Through his poem, he demonstrates how he becomes older. He loose his hair at some point and also his teeth. At the same time he describe the way he sees the girls he is teaching . to him they are always young and slender and pinker every year. He also, creates a big scandal in our society, which he hides from the authorities. I have not learned there is a lie Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger: That my equivocating eye Loves only by my bodies hunger That I have forced true to feel Or that the lovely world is real Eventually when I read the poem more carefully I discover that the truth is far more disturbing that just the way he sees himself comparison to the girls he is teaching. I realized that by saying† †¦love should be blonder slimmer younger â€Å" he implies that his goal is to sleep with the girls in his class. His only goal was sexual and not educational in purpose, and teaching was the last thing on his ‘to do list’. Therefore, he was lying and deceiving everyone into believing he was a teacher who was concerned about the education his students receive. While the awful truth is that he cared more about his looks and that fact that he is getting old and not the education. The truth is that he cared more to the fact that he can not sleep with them anymore for he is too old now. The truth as I see it in this poem is that he knows the truth but he choose to live a fantasy. â€Å"I have not learned how often I can win, can love, but choose to die. † (Snodgrass, 7) . He as an adult, authority figure knows very well the consequence to his actions. He is well aware of what he has done; he can part from right and wrong, yet he chooses a life of a lie. I feel he was also lying to himself to ignore that he was growing old; he was trying to convince himself he was still young and attractive by sleeping with younger girls. From these stories, and many others, truth can mean different things to different people. Truth can be very hard to deal with and is part of personal growth, as we see in Rodriguez’s story. Truth may be simply boring or make a person appear less heroic as in Marta Martin’s story. In other cases the truth is extremely exaggerated to the point when the author is living his whole life as a lie, as seen in the poem â€Å"April Inventory†. Truth, to me, is essentially the most important virtue in our life. But I won’t judge those who choose to change it for literature. I won’t point a finger and call them liars, for I might embellish the truth sometimes too.