Prompt:
Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
There are books that try to show the world as it is and books that try to show the world as it should or could be. Which sort of books should we be offering children and reading ourselves? One answer is the argument for the value of truth, for “telling it like it is.” Writers could promote certain positive ideals by being less realistic, but all of us—especially children—have a right to be told the truth.
Adapted from Claudia Mills, “The Ethics of Representation: Realism and Idealism in Children’s Fiction”
Assignment:
Should books portray the world as it is or as it should be? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
Response:
Ariadne Hills once remarked, “If I had imagined what my life could have been or what the world should be, I’d never have lived at all.” Different people have different opinions on what the world should be like. No book should dictate what the world should be like. Books ought to portray the world as it is because views on how the world should be are inevitably idealistic and hence impractical. Multiple events throughout history and in literature demonstate that harmless, quixotic thinking can take a turn for the worse.
For instance, Michael Adams shocked the world in 1982 when he shot dead John Lennon, the Beatles singer. Michael had been greatly influenced by J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which proposes a world devoid of “phonies” and hypocrites—a better world, a world that could be. The book had such a heavy impact on Adams that he decided to kill John Lennon, a person he considered the archetypal “phony”. As a result of one book depicting the world as the author thought it should be, an innocent man was killed.
The former Chilean President Carlos Guevara has always maintained that his favorite reading matter was either non-fiction on modern life or fiction set in Chile. So it is no surprise that Guevara had an excellent track record when it came to solving crises such as the Chile-Argentina border dispute. Guevara says that it is as a result of his being aware of current problems and the daily life of an average Chilean citizen that his administration has been so successful. Had he been raised on books on utopian worlds, Guevara would have focused more on creating a Chile of the future rather than paying attention to the present and Chile would not have experienced the massive economic growth it did under him.
In the film Midnight in Paris, the protagonist finds the 1920s a highly alluring time period. He feels that the world was a better place a century ago and often finds himself lost in the works of his idols, F. S. Fitzgerald and Hemingway. However, when he gets to go back in time, he realizes that it is better to appreciate the world one has rather than dream of a better one.
In summation, the shooting of John Lennon by an idealist, Carlos Guevara’s success in presidency and the life of the protagonist in Midnight in Paris demonstrate that it is much better to talk of the world as it is rather than as it should be.