Truthful storytelling

After reading A Farewell to Arms, I blogged:

Hemingway simply sucked everything out of me with the anti-war story where the American protagonist signs up to serve in the medical corps of the Italian army in order to fight the good war, ends up deserting that only to have the military come after him because of his AWOL status as an officer, flees to neutral Switzerland with his British "wife" who is pregnant ... and then Hemingway lets the wife die after a difficult birth of a stillborn child. That is simply too cruel!

I could, therefore, totally relate to the Bradley Cooper character in Silver Linings Playbook, when he charges into the parents' bedroom at four in the morning to yell about the very ending that Hemingway wrote.

That ending, after all the experiences, was cruel.

But then it is such an ending that also makes the story real for us readers.  Any other ending would simply not have been truthful.

A good work in literature is as much a pursuit of truth as we expect in rigorous scientific work.  Alan Lightman, who is both an accomplished physicist and a novelist talked about the pursuit of truth in both.  The example that he chose was James Joyce's short story "The Dead," which is a one of the fifteen in The Dubliners.   Lightman said:

A writer's characters or story cannot be proven definitively wrong, but they can ring false and thus lose their power with the reader, and in this way, the novelist is constantly testing his fiction against the accumulated life experiences of his readers.

Orhan Pamuk trusted his readers with his storytelling via plenty of interior monologues of his characters, and he knew well that for the story to ring true he had to write the ending that he did in Silent House.  As I reached the final pages of the novel, like the Bradley Cooper character, I was ready to fling the book while yelling "the fuck!"  But, I did not.