What one experiences is often not the truth. People’s perception of events is susceptible to their own interpretations of what happened. As a result, when telling a story, what actually happens is not what is expressed. Rather, it is what was felt and what was believed. This aspect of storytelling, the inherent falseness that arises, is what makes it so crucial to the narrator in Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” and to Sister Ursula in Richard Russo’s “The Whore’s Child.” In “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien recounts a story where one of his comrades, Curt Lemon, dies after stepping on a mortar round. However, for a tale about death, it was strikingly beautiful. Lemon’s face immediately before dying was “brown and shining”…show more content… In Russo’s fiction writing class, Sister Ursula writes a story of her life, where her mother is a prostitute and her father is the pimp. Yet, throughout her life, and while writing her story, Sister Ursula had an extreme misperception of her father, thinking of him as a Jesus-figure, who would swoop in to save her from her suffering, just as Jesus had “stepped down from the cross to become the light and salvation of the world” (608). It was only after sharing her story to the class that she was able to realize the fact that her father was a pimp. Like O’Brien, storytelling is valuable to Sister Ursula because all the events she experiences are through her own perspective. Sister Ursula’s perception of her life was tinted with the inevitable bias of her own feelings and desires. However, unlike O’Brien, this is important because sharing it allowed her to better understand her life through seeing the viewpoints of others. Russo described fiction writing as an enterprise with the purpose “to become skilled in making things up, of substituting our own truth for the truth” (605), and at the conclusion, Sister Ursula recognizes that she “was writing what you call a fictional story after all” (605). Sister Ursula believed what she wanted to believe. She believed in her own version of the truth – one where she would be rescued from her misfortune and hardships. Storytelling is what allowed her to be able see the truth, allowing her to better understand herself and her
