Story Telling Time

Story telling. This is the earliest form of entertainment known to man kind. Since the very beginning of human existance on the planet, people have told stories and passed them down from generation to generation. Starting off as an oral tradition, in time they became permanent memories in the form of books and novels. Now fast forwarding into today's present time, stories have transformed into grand cinematic adventures, sucking the audience into thier world more so than ever before.

In the story of Forrest Gump, he see the tale of a simple man who leads a life that is anything but simple. He tells us his life story and we cannot help but fall in love with his endearing personality. "...the naivete that comes through a limited understanding of the world around him gives Forrest a uniquely positive perspective of life," (Berardinelli, Reelviews). Forrest having a bit of a mental handicap sees things slightly skewed. Forrest is by no means lieing to us when he describes a situation, but we know he's not telling us the whole story only because he cannot understand the full story. This blending of Forrest's truth vs. the truth that we all know is the driving perspective of the film. We see how Forrest is interperting the scene and then as we do it ourselves, we realize that he's not able to fully grasp the concept and we almost feel pity for him. But even if Forrest wasn't able to comprehend a situation in its entirety, he was able to see some things very clearly. "...like that moutain lake. It was so cool and clear, Jenny, it looked like there were two skies one on top of the other. And then in the dessert, when the sun comes up, I couldn't tell where heaven stopped and the earth began. It's so beautiful," (Forrest Gump)

However when speaking of stories that blend truth with fiction, one cannot go without mentioning Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. In there we read the real stories of his days in the Vietnam war, and also the fake stories of his days in Vietnam. Sometimes he will let the audience know what is real and what isn't, but then he will contradict himself, leaving the reader in a factual confusion. "As a fiction writer, I do not write just about the world we live in, but I also write about the world we ought to live in, and could, which is a world of imagination." (O'Brien Writing Vietnam). This book was personally difficult for me to read because of O'Brien's constant contradiction of "real or not real." It was just a personal pet peeve not being able to tell what is fact or fiction and being lost in a vast confusion, even though that was the way O'Brien intended the memoir to be.



http://www.reelviews.net/movies/f/forrest.html