Talking about the power of fiction in an interview with David Lipsky in 1996, David Foster Wallace says “there’s a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us…it has to do with the sense of capturing what the world feels like to us…If I could articulate it, then there wouldn’t be any need to make up stories about it.” To capture the complexities of how he perceives the world, he cannot describe it outright but has to use a set of stories to illustrate what he is talking about. The same applies for non-fiction, except that you can’t just “make up” the stories, you have to observe them. Some things, some emotions, some of the ways that individuals understand the world around them are too complex to articulate it with the language that we have, so instead writers use metaphor.

A Few Thoughts On Metaphor     Monsters      The Lakehouse

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