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FALLACIES

While reading a short story we often tend to overlook minor and sometimes even major fallacies in the story. If we look again at the fallacy carefully we learn that the story is far-fetched. These fallacies are not simply amongst amateur authors but even with distinguished ones. The reason we overlook these errors is because we are so involved in the story that we believe everything. At times we sympathize with the main character and then tend to believe all the fallacies that the author puts forward. One of the major elements in these fallacies is exaggeration. To make readers aware of these fallacies I would like to show how we fail to notice them. There are some stories that are unreal and over-exaggerated, yet these stories might not have any fallacies because they are deliberately written in that manner to emphasize or depict a symbolic meaning to the story. An exaggeration or unreality without any purpose would have to fall into the ‘fallacy’ category.
In the ‘Accompanist’ by Anita Desai, a young man serves a great musician, Ustad Rahim Khan, as his accompanist for fifteen years. A few childhood friends, who couldn’t perceive this intimate and Guru-shishya relation, provoke the accompanist to come out of the shadows of his master and play in the limelight. After fifteen years of dedicated service, the accompanist suddenly begins to doubt his Ustad because of a few childhood playmates who he is meeting after almost two decades. The fact that the accompanist doubts his Ustad itself is hard to believe and then again the doubt lasts only for fifteen minutes. The end is too dramatic, because the accompanist is weeping simply because he thinks he shouldn’t have even doubted his master for fifteen minutes.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ has plenty of fallacies that we overlook. Mr. Kapasi a part time taxi driver is actually an interpreter to a doctor in Orissa. Mr Kapasi was once a multi-linguist but...