Umali, Harold S.

ARTS1-G

2015-65789 Reflection Paper #1

Stories and the Convenience of Truth

Stories are very meaningful mediums of art. They represent the language and the experience
of the author in the field. It can be used for the purpose of entertaining children by vividly describing
events in simple yet meaningful terms; others for grabbing the interest of young and old adults by
invoking images being described in the story; and for some just simply immortalizing the theme, the
character/s of the story, or even the story itself so that it would be handed down to future
generations preserving its existence.
Such example of immortalization is the woman described in Maxine Hong Kingston’s ​No
Name Woman where the story is told in a precautionary style. The circumstances of the woman, the
author’s long-distant aunt, is tragic; committed adultery, hid and conceived a child in times of
suffering, and cast aside and forgotten by her own family and village. One can infer the times of
struggles for women during this period in China and how it can remind us of the culture on how the
community deals with women through this tragic setting of the story.
Though the story passed down to her is incomplete the author is allowed logical assumptions
about her unnamed aunt and the process of her tragic fate. It is possible to assume a scenario for
someone who is not a witness to the incident but as someone who just received it from her mother,
a primary source. Whether it is credible or not, told by one or many, Kingston shaped her own
version of the truth about her aunt; one that reflects her subversion to the Chinese culture.
Though there are stories whose events can be left for the reader’s interpretation. If allowed,
we may have had a different assumption on Kingston’s aunt based on our morals, language and/or
experiences, resulting in different perspectives about her aunt but with the same conclusion. In the
process, we are able to craft our own truth about her aunt. Though it would lead to potential
inconsistencies of her aunt’s character.
Another example of an inconsistency due to personal accounts and truths is the story of
Ryonusuke Akutagawa’s ​In a Grove​. The story is told in a detective-esque format; taking the role of a
narrating “detective” interviewing witnesses of a crime committed by a bandit. Never mind the
witnesses indirectly related to the crime, the accounts of the three people involved (Tajomaru,
Takehiko and Masago) differ from each other, as if trying to convey their most convenient truth.
Tajomaru’s account (despite some inconsistencies) is the closest truth described by the others and is
already a suitable ending to the case but the accounts of the victims managed to confuse even
probably the readers due to the sequence of the events being unexpected and out-of-place.
Nevertheless, all the truths are convincing because they all confessed though unfortunately the case
will never be solved because of the nature of the truths.
It is not wrong to have many truths reaching the same conclusion but it is not right to declare
that one and only one truth is absolute because even a word can have different meanings to
different people; there are different ways people interpret what they can perceive. The problem is
that people may only consider the most convenient truth for them, disregarding others as
inconvenient or such that does not relate to one’s experiences (unless the person is open-minded.)
In a matter of immortalization, it is problematic to tell people “...this happened so it resulted to this,
but this also happened with the same result...” as it would spark discussions regarding the actual
happening of the story, which in this case debatable. Which side of the story to immortalize is a
matter for another time, but one should consider and weigh all the truths presented upon them,
whether it would be convenient or not, for themselves or for everyone.