Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories

TLDR: The Sun Also Rises as discussed by the authors is a true story, but it is made up, and it is not a "true story" because there is no end to give it shape.

Abstract: ECAUSE IT IS MADE UP, a story ends where it ends. In this way there is a connection between the kind of shape and the kind of truth we expect in fictional narrative. When students come up after class to ask if Lady Brett Ashley or Jake Barnes is going to commit suicide, we ask them to unask the question. Were the deaths of Lady Brett or Jake Barnes at all important, Hemingway would have made them a part of the story. Students of course are free to invent more material so long as they know that what they are doing is writing their own story. But in Hemingway's story, as in any story, the last event is the last one the author chooses to give us. In this regard, fictional narrative has no futurity; it keeps happening eternally, which is why we commonly retell stories in the present tense. The policeman raises his baton, the taxi slows to a halt, Brett presses against Jake, and Jake delivers that bitter line: "Yes ... Isn't it pretty to think so?" What follows is a vast and irrelevant plenum of pure possibility. Conversely, were The Sun Also Rises supposed to be a "true story," its ending would inescapably seem false-a fictive touch. Naturally, historians have to end their histories somewhere, and, as Hayden White has argued, they draw on other conventions of storytelling besides that of an ending to render what happened in the real world. But Sartre was right when he said that there are no "true stories." Whatever is goes on forever; there is no end to give it shape. Brett