Wednesday, November 14, 2012
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Senior Member
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Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Lahore
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Truth is Stranger than Fiction
There is a general tendency to read fiction (novels and short stories) in order to find thrill and excitement and thus to relieve the boredom of life. What people don't realise is that truth or actual happenings of life provide more excitement and thrill than fiction. We read stories of crime and detection because we feel the need for sensation. This is somehow our psychological requirement. But crimes actually committed, their gory details, the difficult but interesting process of their investigation, are more sensational than fictional crimes and their detection. In ingenuity, planning and brutality, actual crimes surpass the crimes committed in the fiction. Matricide, patricide, homicide, suicide are all reported by newspapers and the accounts of these are hair-raising. Bank hold-ups, highway robberies, smuggling, abduction, kidnapping, rape these are similar other outrages as reported by newspapers are more sensational and fascinating than imaginary account of these happenings given by story writers. The assassination of president Kennedy followed by the murder of the alleged assassin and subsequent happenings were far more breath-taking, sensational, and baffling than anything in fiction. Indeed, real life offers stranger things than the ones invented by the imagination of the creative writers. When we study fiction, we unconsciously suspend our disbelief and, for the time being, begin to take fictional accounts as truths. These accounts appear to us to be very strange. Romantic literature contains this element of strangers in a high degree. 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Gulliver's Travels' can be quoted in this regard. But when we come across actual truths in the world of men, we realise that these truths are strangers than fictional accounts. A mentally mature person always prefers reality to fiction which in the ultimate analysis, remains a figment of the imagination. There can be no substitute for reality which is always stranger than fiction.
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