Importance Of Fiction's Essentiality To Success And Happiness

Great Essays
Topic 3: Fiction’s essentiality to success and happiness

Success and happiness are considered amongst the most important aspects in everyone’s life. Everyone strives to be successful in various ways, but the question here is that - is it necessarily achieved by reading Fiction stories or not? Well, this is something one could argue upon – in favor or against of reading fiction stories. I read a few fiction stories this semester including “What you pawn I will Redeem”, “The Lottery”, “The Swimmers”, “The UFO”, “ I‘m a Mad Dog Biting Myself for Sympathy” and came across few themes such as tradition, generosity, self-deception, homelessness, quest, love, society, etc. But in accordance to my thoughts and imagination it isn’t necessary
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The characters and the scenario are all imaginary things, where the characters aren’t bound to any rules and regulations as we are in our real life. Every action in the stories takes place as per the author demands; the characters react in the manner the author imagines them to, while that’s not the case in real life, as people don’t necessarily react the way we expect them to. Basically, there is no stop to ones imagination in fiction stories; they can take us to any place, culture or time. But my question here is - Is it appropriate for one to live in an imaginary or say a fantasy world like this, where you are far away from the truth and realities of life? Definitely, one might agree on my views while others might disagree because most believe that we get to learn quiet a lot by reading fiction stories, like quest, facing challenges and not giving up on anything in life, exactly similar to what the hero’s do in all fiction stories, one such example is Jackson, in Sherman Alexie’s story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”, where he is having a conversation about his grandmother’s Regalia with Officer William’s and he tells the Officer, “I am on a mission here. I want to be a hero, you know? I want to win it back, like a Knight.” (24) This shows his yearning to get back his grandmother’s Regalia, which was once stolen years ago and even after being homeless and having faced so many …show more content…
As we see it in John Cheever’s story, he tries to relate the weather with Ned’s life, earlier everything seems to be good, but later we notice things change so does the weather, “ The door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stairs…Then there was an explosion, a cordite, and rain,”(81) giving us hints of something unpleasant to happen in Ned’s life, he then slowly, step by step comes across his life’s truth and the misfortunes, which he was running away from and was unwilling to accept. So, practically the author is trying to create a scenario where he wants to make his audience aware of the future comings by just relating it to the weather, therefore, the ones who are into reading fiction stories would surely be convinced by what the author is trying to do, but in my opinion – its mere an author’s imagination, how one can relate weather change to good or bad happening in real life. Few more things that could be symbolic are color, sunlight, sunset, etc., where sunrise is often depicted as a new beginning or a new birth and sunset as an ending or death – again if that is how real life goes then probably one could relate everything that happens around them – like the weather, color, sunrise and

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