“Mom will you look under my bed for a monster?” the little girl asked. The mom replied with “yes honey, but there are no monsters.” However, the stories that we read may prove otherwise. The monsters in the stories conjure up a very different image than the little girl was imagining. As a result of the authors placing the monsters in real-life settings, and linking the stories to fact-based events, the work draws a greater impact on the reader. When the reader believes the story is true, the impact is profound and the monsters truly become real. In class, we have been reading stories that revolve around the theme monsters and heroes. Two examples of these types of stories include Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where …show more content…
In the case of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” readers are not necessarily aware of the correlation between Charles Schmid and the story. It is required to look much further into it to know the significance and possibly doing research. The reader takes in what they read at surface level and typically accepts that to be the truth of “what happened.” With this knowledge, the author is able to elicit the maximum impact on the reader. There is a certain draw that a story “based on actual events” has on the reader and yet, the author has the advantage of adding or removing certain events to heighten this …show more content…
Certain details may be added or taken out for a variety of reasons. Personal, familial details may be taken out for reasons of personal identity protection. On the other hand, sometimes details may be reorganized, or added in order to better convey a message or point. Sometimes, details are changed because a story is loosely referencing an event and the story is not fully representing that event. Another scenario is that a story may be told from a perspective, which could be vastly different if told by another person experiencing the same event. The poem “In the Loop” by Bob Hicok is also based on a true event, but is told from the perspective of one individual. The poem opens with “I heard from people after the shootings” (Hicok line 1) this tells the readers that the poem it is likely about a shooting that the author witnessed or was involved in. He goes on to explain how everyone reached out to him but “there’s nothing to say” (Hicok line 6). If the events described in the story are not enough to identify that this is an account of the mass shooting that occurred on April 6th, 2007 at Virginia Tech, then the reader could look at the online version which clearly identifies Virginia Tech as the author’s employer. (Hicok, 2012). The readers begin to sympathize with Hicok when they realize what he has experienced. The use of the word I also intrigues the