The claim to truth

So one of the important things about biographies and autobiographies is that they claim to be true.

Some of them do so implicitly, simply by being sincere and giving us no reason to think that this is fiction.

Some make their claim explicitly:

• Celebrity autobiographies often tell us: what you’ve read in the newspapers is mythology and hearsay. This is the truth.
• Some biographies say: the earlier biographies about this person were wrong. Here is the true story.

But many works of fiction also claim to be true. Yann Martel’s Self is brilliantly confusing because it appears to be an autobiography. When I started reading, I thought it was telling the true story of Martel’s life - until he described an event that I believed to be physically impossible.

Suddenly, I started seeing the work as fiction. My relationship with the text changed.

This story claimed to be true, but I rejected that claim and treated it as fiction instead, because there was something about the text that I was unable to believe.

Perhaps, then, more important than a story being true, or even claiming to be true, is whether or not we believe it is true. And where does that belief come from? Textual details can influence our decision, of course - if the story seems flippant or irrational, we might doubt its claim to factual truth. But ultimately, when assessing a text, we bring to it the history of everything we have ever read, thought and heard. We bring to it our prejudices, our superstitions, our cultural bias, our faith and our passion.

A lot is said about the unreliable narrator, but we need to think also about the unreliable reader - who, in the end, gets to decide what to make of a story.

• Belief
• Autobiography as History?
• Novelists who lie

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