FIELD OF ACTIVITY OF FICTION Of the four main genre of the literary work, Fiction is said to be one that has plot, characterization, mood, style, setting, and symbol as its tool. This no doubt agrees with its concept that it is a device by which human beings communicate in concrete terms their understandings of the world, the self, and the human situation,
How does its world or its environment look like? What entertainment or tragidy does it proffer to its readers?
We all respond to fiction. For instance,many of us appreciate to listen to stories by our parents or teachers. We equally like to go to the cinema from time to time to watch television, the fare of which is primarily fiction.
When we dream every night we device our own fiction. Because dreams are fiction, we can move to answer by way of dreams. Think of a dream you`ve had that seemed of some particular significance when you woke up. Of whaat was the dream composed? You can agree that it entailed some people in some local area doing something, as well as an "author"(you as dreamer)and feelings of some sort. Although both people and the place were most likely drawn from external or `real` world, the dream created its own world. After sleep you might have started interpreting it in light of its details, and how it makes you to feel. Your dream then became a text and you its reader. If you went further and told it to someone else, then you become a narrator to the material of the dream.
Like dream, formal works of fiction present characters located somewhere, engaged in something.Formal works of fiction, too, involve feelings - the felings of characters within the fiction and the feelings aroused in the reader.
Also, although the people and place in formal fiction may be drawn from the external world, every piece of fiction creates its own world. And in no formal fiction of any complexity does anyone simply tell us the meaning. We must interprete meaning for ourselves just as we interprete our own dreams. Fictions of whatever sort are dramatic rather than discursive.
In the words of Flannery O`conner, "The fiction writer doesn`t state, he shows and renders.
Another interesting thing in this arena, is the controvesy in fact and fiction. Sometimes young readers ask `Why bother with fiction, which means `untrue` or doesn`t it? Although it`s granted that every piece of fiction is a story that to some extent is made up and so is untrue. This is not to say that fictions do not contain facts, but only that we read fiction for something other than fact.
The truth of fiction is not the truth of history or science, but the more personal truth of human feelings and disposition, communicated best when that substantial part of ourselves that understand primarily through the senses and the emotins is touched. We go to fiction for exactly what history and science cannot deliver: an intimate sense of the inner lives of people, their deepest feelings, their conflicts, and confusions, their most secret joys and fears.
We go to fiction to understand life not in the abstract, but in the flesh. The beauty of fiction is that because it is fictional, it can be constructed to reveal what can be revealed in no other way. Through its various elements, fiction reveals our inner lives.
So such is the field of activity or the operational area of fiction.