The Fabric of Our Lives: Fiction in Our Everyday World

There’s no way around it, we experience storytelling in every facet of our daily lives. The minute we close the door behind us, as we leave our cocoon, the world presents a series of events to be witnessed, interpreted, and told by us. There is a compulsion to attach an explanation, a story, to what we see before us. The primary function of storytelling is to help us understand something. It sates our curiosity, and is likely why fiction succeeds, more than non-fiction, in holding our attention.

            As J.J. Rivera can attest, we read other people at work, at school, at play. And, out of all these daily routines, a story will emerge. And, it’s usually a fictional one. It’s in the gestures, faces, and voices we encounter. It’s the kid who picked up milk on the way home, stuffing a gum pack in his jeans before leaving the store. Did he steal the gum or pay for it? It’s the guy walking the family dog after dinner, who meets a woman at a park? Is that his wife or is he cheating? J.J. put in his 7/7 post, you can tell someone is lying because they’re lips are moving. But, as seen in the same post, it can be written too. There was enough ambiguity between the last two sentences about the incident to make one wonder what happened between those two moments. Is this the reason there is only one officer making the report? If more than one officer were to make a report, would there be different stories? Everything is a matter of perspective and interpretation.

            This ability to interpret starts when we were young and being read our first stories. Eventually, we begin to read them on our own. Their narratives and their tropes become familiar. So, after years of reading and witnessing stories, this art of fiction is ingrained in us. Take for instance reality television, which has become a prevalent fixture. It is purely constructed, and hardly real at all. There’s no veracity in the vérité. And, yet, the public gravitate to it. This could explain the acceptance of fictional memoirs. It’s as if we’ve become sanitized to what truth is, as long as your story makes us think, feel, or understand something.

            Or did it really matter what the truth was in the first place? Fiction may not be real, and may not be true, but it lives around us, with us, in us. It’s a part of us, and imparts those universal truths, which help us to understand something about the world and our place in it.