History as Fiction Thoughts

When I signed up for History as Fiction, I thought that the books I would read in class would resemble books of the historical fiction genre. I never thought that actual fiction was going to be put in books telling the tales of history. "How can you put something totally nonsensical into the telling of history? Aren't history and fiction opposites? You can't just add any made-up stuff you want to!" were among a few of my thoughts when I started the course.

Then I got to reading the books, and I thought it was pretty cool that authors intertwined fiction in the telling of so many familiar historical events/people/periods. That's basically all I thought of the books in History as Fiction by mid third quarter. They're not messing up the telling of history, they're just making for an interesting story to read.

When I started reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I started to see that the incorporation of fiction goes beyond for just the making of a cool version of the story. The insertion of the Tralfamadorians highlighted the way we perceive war, among other things. Than Kindred came along, and I definitely took notice to what time travel did to the way we look at the antebellum south in the slavery era. Libra was on a different level of incorporating fiction to emphasize the dynamics of the oh so many conspiracy theories.

And when I look back on it, I can see that the fiction isn't just make-believe to spice up the story, it highlights important dynamics in history. The fiction isn't opposite to history, it gives us a clearer sense of what happened because history doesn't have all the important dynamics, it just has facts. Fiction can give us what it gives to fictional characters (motives, feelings, thoughts, intentions,...) because history misses out on that.