Course taken: Senior Year (2022-2023)
Reflection:
Through the lens of Tim O’Brien, Louise Eldrich, and many others, stories about truth, perspective, life, death, accountability and self-determination taught me the interconnectedness of everyday happenings. After reading O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, I was forced to think about how events and places can change a person. How are those events portrayed or how should they be portrayed? O’Brien the soldier, and O’Brien the narrator were two totally different people. Depending on the time in one’s life, there are different things to “carry”. Different responsibilities, different experiences, and perhaps traumas. In this short yet concise novel, “happening truth” and “story truth” were recurring ideas applied to a story. As humans we often believe the only moral choice is happening truth or reality. However, story truth better conveys the emotions felt, and the impact of an event. This concept continued to invade my thoughts reading every other book throughout the year; sometimes I would translate the thoughts of the same event told by two people, which often sounded quite contradictory. I was able to take their story's truths and create one shared happening truth. Eliminating drama and emotion, I could clearly see an event, and only then would I understand why the characters felt the way they did. Nectar’s plunge and the painting it inspired in Love Medicine is another example of happening truth formed to create story truth. In reality his “plunge” looked like a small step in him finally making a choice. His “story” truth was that it felt like jumping off a cliff into a raging river below, as he has never been able to make a finite choice. Outside of this English class, I began to apply “story truth” vs. “happening truth” to not only other classes, but life. Reality vs. the way we feel and experience life. History, as a story, but who is telling it? Questions after questions. Thought after thought. And all it took was a single book.