A Reality Check

Real: 1. Adj. Existing as in fact;actual;true. “Actual.” “True.” “Real.” These are the words that we have attempted to use to make sense of our lives and our universe, to define what we see and what we feel. These words, however, have one fatal flaw: they assume that reality is a definite entity that can be defined. What happens, though, if there is no such thing as “real”? How can we be so sure that when one person looks at something and calls it real, someone else doesn’t look at it and see something completely different? These are questions posed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner in Chronicle of a Death Foretold and As I Lay Dying, respectively. They have attempted to, and succeeded with, portraying reality and truth as subjective; every individual creates their own reality. Faulkner, especially, in chilling, and at times humorous fashion, showed the world through the eyes of 15 different narrators – unsurprisingly, each one of these narrators has their own opinion of what the world is. With their novels, Marquez and Faulkner have proven that reality is subjective and not objective, a reflection of each individual’s persona.

There are various reasons as to why reality is subjective and not objective, but they all begin by asking the same question: is there such a thing as an absolute reality?

Faulkner and Marquez would answer no. To have a universal reality would imply that there is an ordered universe creating order in our lives and in our world. Along with modern writing, Faulkner and Marquez have thrown that ordered universe right out of the picture - and if there is no such cosmic order, what then creates order and makes sense of our world? We do. Reality is subjective because there is no concrete absolute reality that we can rely on to be true. Lacking this, every individual will unavoidably interpret the world their own way; they will see their side of the story, because there is no narrator in the sky to tell them the real story. Every person looks at life through a stained-glass window called their perception, and every single person’s stained-glass window is a different shade based on any number of personal factors. For example, to Cora Tull’s narrow and religious view in As I Lay Dying, life is a journey – one in which she’s “bounding toward [her] god and [her] reward”(93). To Darl, however, life isn’t so simple. Before his mother dies, Darl comments that “it takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end”(39). Darl looks at life and sees no meaning; Cora looks and sees a fulfilling journey. Two people can look at any one thing and see two completely different things - which then is the “real” thing? Are either real? Are both real? Are neither real?

Or perhaps it’s a futile attempt to answer any of those questions. Perhaps reality is as abstract as the human mind, and is subjective not only because of the lack of a cosmic reality, but because of simple human nature and emotion. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, every member of the town attempted to explain the death of Santiago Nasar with all sorts of evidence and logic, resulting in a different view of the same event. Is it an honor-bound requirement, or a cold-blooded murder? To the two twins that committed the crime, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, it was “homicide in legitimate defense of honor” and they “declared at the end of the trial that they would have done it again a thousand times over for the same reason”(55). They went on to say that “We killed him openly…but we’re innocent”(55). Luisa Santiaga, friend of Santiago Nasar’s mother, had quite a different view, based on her honest rationale and her ties to the situation: “Lowlifes, she was saying under her breath, ‘shitty animals that can’t do anything that isn’t something awful’”(26). The narrator in Chronicle of a Death Foretold also exemplified the theory of reality based on perception, which was in turn dependent on human rationale and emotion, two completely subjective items. He says that, “I had a very confused memory of the festival before I decided to rescue it piece by piece from the memory of others” (48). The irony in this is that at the end of the novel, he knows less and has an even more confused knowledge of it then he did at the beginning; memories, too, are only windows, serving only to further shroud his “knowledge” of what really happened. Each memory was undoubtedly dependent on how the person was related and/or connected to the victim – on their window.

Our windows are shaded not only by what’s up in the cosmos, or what’s not up there, and by our emotions, but also by our environment. Environment is another factor playing into the idea that reality is subjective. Location, education, age, etc. are all a reflection of who we are – they are also a reflection of how we see the world. A child’s reality is much different then an aged grandparent. Take for example Vardaman in As I Lay Dying; his young, confused mind puts together everybody else’s reality of his mother’s death as something completely different: “My mother is a fish”(84). His reality is based on what he sees, what he can understand and the connections he can make, just as all of our realities are. They are, at least partially, results of the environment we live in. Therefore, unless we all lived in the same, identical environment, and were the exact same age, size, shape, color, etc., it would be impossible to say that reality is objective; each of those plays, to various degrees, a factor in how we see and interpret the world around us, how we shape our realities.

Each and every individual looks at the world through a different lens – these lenses are our perspective, and it would be impossible for us to take away that lens; the lack of a cosmic order, human emotion and mind, and environment prevent us from doing so. Each of those factors serves to promote varying perspectives that directly and indirectly reflect the individual. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner skillfully painted this idea throughout both of their novels; they have answered the original question, “Is there such a thing as a universal or subjective reality?” with stunning clarity. Their writing must make us examine our own view of reality, and how it is altered by our own factors; we will never know who has the “true” reality, because the fact of the matter is that there is no true reality – there are only a lot of windows.