Fiction vs Non-Fiction Literature - Essay Example

For nonfiction, the author creates a story that has its entire framework already existing. That is, the events of the story and the characters correspond to real events and individuals. The author may creatively fill in details, such as various minor events and minor aspects of character, but this does not make the work fiction. A writer of nonfiction is allowed to alter minor details to create a piece that is interesting to read. The majority of life is boring and to make a work of nonfiction interesting and purposeful minor alterations are often needed.

In contrast, authors of fiction create a story that does not have an existing framework. The author must create events and characters entirely from his own mind. These events and characters might contain characteristics and details that originate in various situations and people in the author’s life, but this does not make the work nonfiction. Fiction is the creation of a piece from the elements of the author’s mind.

In short, nonfiction is altering true events and characters to create a purposeful piece of writing, and fiction is creating events and characters by rearranging parts of the author’s knowledge to create a purposeful piece of writing.

The narrator of “No Name Woman” by Maxine Hong Kingston is a woman who is lacking an identity. She is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant family, and as such, she has no identity in America. To create some semblance of a life, she focuses on understanding herself by understanding her cultural history. From this history, she selects her aunt who committed suicide due to pregnancy borne of adultery. This aunt was a ghost, a woman erased from the family’s past. In her aunt, the narrator finds a kindred soul, a woman with no identity. By creating an imagined life for this aunt, the narrator creates a life for herself.

Each part of the aunt’s life has a corollary in the character of the narrator. The narrator considers her aunt’s unknown lover as a means of understanding her own beliefs about love and belonging. The aunt’s lover is someone in the village, but she never reveals him, and he never reveals himself. When thinking about her aunt’s lover, the narrator considers what it means to be attractive in American culture. She wonders how she will attract Chinese boys without attracting everyone else. She is even unsure of whom she wishes to attract. She finds the pain she feels in trying to find someone to love in her new culture reflected in her aunt’s life. The village punishes the aunt for attempting to have a private life, and the narrator feels punished for having a private life as well.

The aunt’s role as an outcast in her community mirrors the narrator’s view of herself as an outcast in American society. The narrator understands that her aunt was an outcast because the aunt was living with her parents when she should have been living with her husband’s parents. From this realization, the narrator reasons that the family would have forced the aunt to eat alone and separate from the family. This separation is what the narrator feels in America. She both takes part in the culture and is separated from it.

Lastly, the aunt’s story creates a fear within the narrator that endures for twenty years. Because of the shame she has brought upon the family, the aunt is cast from the family home the night her baby is born. That same night she kills herself and her child by throwing herself into a well. The narrator is told this story only once as a lesson to never shame her family or she too will be erased from the family history. But, she grows this lesson into a necessary part of her identity as both a Chinese woman and immigrant. The story of the aunt becomes the mirror through which she understands her role in both cultures and through which she feels the pain of being an outsider.

The story of the aunt defines the character of the narrator. Through the story, the reader understands the struggle of the narrator in fitting into American culture. Without the story, the character of the narrator would be lacking and the sense of pathos regarding being an immigrant to American would not exist.