Everyday Canvas

Fiction and Emotional Truths

Prompt: David Burns say, “The reason fantasy is an old but thriving literary genre is because fantasy stories speak to emotional truths.” Do you agree?

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Well, that purple heart does not belong only to the fantasy genre because most fiction deals with emotional truths. What the fantasy genre has over the others is the abundance of metaphors, which the readers may or may not catch on to while reading a fantasy story. In other words, the fantasy genre offers emotional truths by cleverly hiding them. So, from where I stand, the quote is only partly correct.

Fact is, all fiction is a lie that tells or points to truths, which the readers feel intuitively. The purpose of this telling or pointing to emotional truths is to create empathy. Empathy is the key purpose of all great literature when the stories cause the readers to feel the grief, annoyance, joy, love, and hate that the characters feel.

In addition, great literature never shields the readers from evidence or facts by cloaking them with emotion (sappiness). This clashing of emotion with the fact (that is, the facts as we know and understand them) and how a character either accepts his wrong and changes or resists can reveal to a reader a core emotional experience beyond the particular situation in a story. This is what is meant by emotional truths.

Thus, within the boundaries of great literature, the fantasy genre is only one player on a crowded stage.