Nathaniel Hawthorne claims in his novel, The Scarlet Letter, that the moral of the story is to “be true be true be true!” (387). This is of course referring to Dimmesdale’s decline and demise that seemed to stem from his hidden secret, but does being true always mean repeating stories with the exact facts? In “Good Form” by Tim O’Brien, he claims that “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (115)-- that sometimes altering the story of what really happened can produce more truth than a simple recitation. “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” by Tim O’Brien, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, …show more content…
Often, exaggerated stories perpetuated by society have a more profound effect on the listeners than a relation of actual facts. Stories are more compelling and powerful when the teller does not limit themselves to perfect accuracy. In “Sweetheart,” O’Brien states that Rat Kiley exaggerates his stories to “heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt” (56 pdf). Rat understands that to convey the truth of his story, he had to evoke an emotional response, and for Rat, “facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around” (56). As third-party listeners, we often insufficiently imagine what the storyteller may have been through. The only way to counteract this natural lack of empathy is by exaggerating the story (“multiplying by maybe”) to try and recreate the actual truth of the story within the listener’s mind. In Scarlet Letter, there are many stories circling the imprint on Dimmesdale’s chest, which Hawthorne states are all “conjectural”(230). Although Dimmesdale spoke the same words, revealed the same mark, and performed the same actions in front of everyone that day, the crowd left with countless different versions of the story to tell, some even suggesting that there was no