The Power of Storytelling in "Life of Pi" and "Goodbye Lemon"

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Storytelling and Its Prominence Stories are simply theories that have gone through many generations of revising and editing, many of which may still be inaccurate today. However, no matter how imperfect a story may be, it is still effective and powerful enough to influence the ways in which we live. As once said by Ben Okri, “The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” It is amazing how a combination of twenty-six letters can be held against us, define us, change our lives, and inspire us. Storytelling is important to human existence because it is a means of capturing memories of the past and incorporating them into ethical and everyday life. Memory and ethics coincide with each other as one can be an explanation or an observation of the other; without one, the other would most likely not make sense. Goodbye Lemon written by Adam Davies is a wonderful example that exudes the power of storytelling. The narrator, Jack, writes of the many different personal qualities and traits his deceased brother Dexter might have possessed, since Jack was too young to have any memory of his brother. Through the prologue of Goodbye Lemon , Davies wants to convey to his audience that you can bring any character to life through writing. Jack had brought Dexter back to life (as Jack states in the last line of the prologue) although he did not have any memory of him, other than the fateful day Dexter died. Storytelling is vital here because people often twist their memories as they write, because they want to get a point across to their readers. Jack tries to bring back memories of who Dexter could have been by writing different scenarios, thus bending his memories in order to find out something about his brother who he does not remember. That which is demanded by ethics greatly
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