"Over the years [Gisgo's] cronies had tired of hearing about his remarkable experience. They took it for just another tall tale, anyway." (p. 313)
This raises a moral question. Children learn to distinguish between true statements, lies and fictions but is there a fourth category: the yarn or tall tale?
Someone told me of an experience in India. I relayed it to a third party. The third party responded, "Jim tells a good story!" or "You didn't believe him, did you?" My response was annoyance not at Jim for lying to me but at myself for being taken in. In other words, I seemed to accept the legitimacy of the "yarn." Its characteristics are:
it is presented as a true story;
it is meant to be enjoyed but not believed;
even if believed, it does not deceive the hearer in any way that matters;
the hearer plays along, maybe by laughing or by expressing surprise, but does not contradict.
Is the yarn a legitimate narrative form intermediate between a lie and a fiction?
1 comment:
There's a classic story of a sailor telling a tall tale to a kid ashore, and it ends with the kid saying "And what happened then?"
And the sailor says: "Why, then I died, lad!"
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