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Many novels are told from a first-person point of view, mimicking a testimony. Moby Dick. The Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Handmaid's Tale. The narr

by kijin 5y ago

Many novels are told from a first-person point of view, mimicking a testimony. Moby Dick. The Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Handmaid's Tale. The narrators are far from ungrounded voices coming from the middle of nowhere as the OP insinuates. They are deliberately created to be as relatable, or sometimes alien, as the author chooses. The oldest stories were personal testimonies, told, retold, embellished and reinterpreted over centuries. It should not be surprising that modern storytellers follow this tradition, and aspire to match the power of testimony. Bad novelists obviously fail at this task. Good ones kinda succeed. The greatest novelists, playwrights and screenwriters, on the other hand, can create fictional narratives that feel even more real than the testimonies of real people. Testimony is powerful, sure, but there is no need to disparage the power of fiction in comparison.

watwut 5y ago
> The oldest stories were personal testimonies What do you mean here? The oldest known is the Oddysey and it is not personal testimony by any definition.
- deleted 5y ago
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- kijin 5y ago
  Tales told around the bonfire in stone-age villages, about that one time Uncle Steve took down a wooly mammoth all on his own, or the mystic forest your great-grandfather came across when he was lost in the snowstorm but couldn't find again when he looked for it the following summer. Generations pass. Steve the Mammoth Slayer becomes a legendary warrior, and the mystic forest is now inhabited by gods. Travelers from other villages bring their own tales of gods and warriors, love and adventure. People start arguing over which hero is stronger, which monster is scarier, whose goddess is sexier. War and conquest would have settled most of those disputes by the time you reached civilization, so that people like Homer could compile the stories that were passed down to them into a more or less consistent mythology.
- voltaireodactyl 5y ago
  To indulge briefly in my own pedantry, I believe Gilgamesh predates the Iliad by nearly a thousand years.

by kijin 5y ago

watwut 5y ago

> The oldest stories were personal testimonies What do you mean here? The oldest known is the Oddysey and it is not personal testimony by any definition.

deleted 5y ago
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kijin 5y ago
Tales told around the bonfire in stone-age villages, about that one time Uncle Steve took down a wooly mammoth all on his own, or the mystic forest your great-grandfather came across when he was lost in the snowstorm but couldn't find again when he looked for it the following summer. Generations pass. Steve the Mammoth Slayer becomes a legendary warrior, and the mystic forest is now inhabited by gods. Travelers from other villages bring their own tales of gods and warriors, love and adventure. People start arguing over which hero is stronger, which monster is scarier, whose goddess is sexier. War and conquest would have settled most of those disputes by the time you reached civilization, so that people like Homer could compile the stories that were passed down to them into a more or less consistent mythology.
voltaireodactyl 5y ago
To indulge briefly in my own pedantry, I believe Gilgamesh predates the Iliad by nearly a thousand years.