The Truth of Fiction

"The Truth of Fiction" is an essay published by Chinua Achebe in 1988.  I can remember reading it in undergrad and thinking, "Yes, that is why I love to read."  I had to read it again for class last week, and I was hoping to be able to find it online somewhere, because I'm so frequently asked this question:  "Why do you like to read so much?"  I couldn't find an online text (it's included in this compilation), so I wanted to share instead a few of my favorite quotes from the essay.


"...art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of realty from that which is given to him; an aspiration to provide himself with a second handle on existence through his imagination."

"It is a truism and a cliche that experience is the best teacher; it is even arguable whether we can truly know anything which we have not personally experienced.  But our imagination can narrow the existential gap by giving us in a wide range of human situations the closest approximation to experience that we are ever likely to get..."

"The life of the imagination is a vital element of our total nature.  If we starve it or pollute it the quality of our life is depressed or soiled."

"... reading the novel explains so much to us and affects radically the way we perceive the world thereafter."

"My theory of the uses of fiction is that beneficent fiction calls into full life our total range of imaginative faculties and gives us a heightened sense of our personal, social and human reality."

"... when a desperate man wishes to believe something however bizarre or stupid nobody can stop him.  He will discover in his imagination a willing and enthusiastic accomplice.  Together they will weave the necessary fiction which will then bind him securely to his cherished intention.
      The fiction which imaginative literature offers us is not like that.  It does not enslave; it liberates the mind of man.  Its truth is not like the canons of an orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition.  It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and human conscience."