Can Truth be Found in Fiction...

     Reading Haroun has only furthered my curiosity in wives tales and fairy tales. I have always wondered where they came from, and the fact they are present in society today makes me believe that they are at least roughly based on truth. Or if not truth they are meant to teach or share something. In Chapter 4 when Haroun is first introduced to the streams of stories that all commingle to create the moon of Kahani's surface, he is told by Iff that a story worth telling will not get mixed up but will hold its own. This really got me thinking about the stories that have survived today. What was it that made them more special the tother stories which may have been told hundreds of years ago and did not survive the passing of time?
   Just as Haroun discovers on the Dull Lake, the stories his father told were coming true. There really was truth in the seeming magical and nonsensical stories his flatter the Shah of Blah spewed. Haroun was able to find truth in the stream of his fathers entertainment. I too have wondered if stories like Peter Pan and the Little Mermaid could be true. I grew up a Disney child and with that I lived in a world of make believe. I wanted to find my own talking fish and Tinkerbell, I wanted to be whisked away in the still of the night and go on an adventure.
    My mom would read to my brother and I close to every night growing up, I listened to and was entangled in the entire C.S. Lewis The Chronicle of Narnia series. I drifted off to sleep countless times with those images and story lines running through my head. It was this power of story that entertained me, taught me, and frightened me. Any woman I met and disliked was instantly the White Witch, because for me that was the ultimate symbol of evil. It is the truth that I found in these stories and paralleled with my own adolescent life that made them a truth.
    Stories come from somewhere, whether they start as truth then morph into fiction, or they start as a fiction that then becomes a truth in the lives of the listener, the cross over is present. As Haroun sped across the surface of the Kahani surface he was going past the truths and fictions that link all stories into the beautiful moon that houses all those worth being remembered.