Frederick Reiken: What is “True”? Thoughts on Fictional “Truth,” Unconscious Metaphor, and Celery (January 2004)

Why is it that a transcription of an actual event can feel unconvincing, while an invented story can feel absolutely true? Frederick Reiken explores what Tim O’Brien has called “story truth,” or the feeling of authenticity that a successful work of fiction conveys; he draws on thinking about this topic by John Berger and John Gardner and on fiction by Tim O’Brien and Franz Kafka to consider how the textual space with its own internal logic makes this kind of “fictional truth” possible.