The style of story-telling is something that every writer struggles with as they put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. How should my story be told? Who should be the narrative voice? What kind of voice should it have? Will I, as the writer, have a part in my story?

Autobiographies tend to solve part of that problem. The author is often telling their own story to the public and everyone listening is listening to them tell everything that they know and part of what someone else knows. In the end though, they are still the only person speaking. Even if there is someone else speaking, the reader can hardly walk up to them and confirm that the other voices in the story, the other stories in their story are really factually accurate. It would make sense since an over-abundance of narrative voices very often causes confusion in the narrative arc. Everyone has their own version of the story and things don’t always match up so neatly that several different people can each tell their account of what happened and the collective result will make sense.

Holley’s Stories We Tell does exactly that.

Everyone’s story about one person gets told and all of that is put together into one big over-riding narrative arc about a single individual. The way it is executed is so perfect that everything everyone says seems as though it is real, even the re-enacted flashbacks of past times seem as though they were shot in the actual moment that it was happening in and just brought back to light in her documentary. However, it turns out that everyone was staged, a particularly poignant part of the whole documentary being the brief scene where a make-up artist is helping an actor apply his mustache. That one single scene manages to make one question the truth of everything that they just watched. It makes one wonder if any of that was actually genuine or was it all staged and scripted.

In Spiegelman’s Maus, Vladek is telling the story. The narrative voice is partially his and partially Spiegelman’s. However, the two voices are distinct and it’s quite believable. As a reader, I never really found myself doubting the truth of the words that belonged to Vladek. The art that depicted his past was done so in such a way that I knew it wasn’t going to be 100% accurate so I can’t say I ever felt deceived by the story-telling. The narrative made it clear where one voice ended and another began. The images made it clear that while it depicted what the Holocaust would have been like for Vladek, it wasn’t exactly like Vladek’s Holocaust experience. There was an implied message to read what was being shown to me with a grain of salt.

Holley’s documentary belonged to no one. It was a odd mish-mash of everyone’s stories. People who weren’t directly involved, people who were involved by association, people who were associated with the people who were involved by association; everyone had a part in telling the story. Real-life narratives of an event or of an individual have multiple perspectives and by exploring all those different perspectives, the telling of the story becomes much more realistic. However, it’s natural to expect a truth and everything that isn’t a truth is expected to be a lie even though everyone knows that isn’t how reality works.

Who gets to tell a story? Everyone tells their bit of the story and now the telling of the story becomes much more believable becomes everyone’s input is taken into account and inconsistencies in between the stories can be uncovered. At the same times, if the original owner of the story is missing, then no one really gets to judge the validity in any of the versions being told. The problem of the narrator is now brought into light. Everyone gets to tell a story but for people to believe the story is true, only one story can be chosen as the ‘truth’. Everything else is just a spin-off of that ‘truth’.

Entering the realm of life narrative is always tricky.

Is it reliable?

That depends.

Do you put 100% faith into anything that strangers, families or friends tell you?

If the answer is yes, then chances are that reading a life narrative is no different.

It’s often viewed that a life narrative constructed from a tenuous strands of one’s memory and the dubiously trustworthy information garnered from friends, loved ones and acquaintances around them are going to be viewed as facts. Since we can’t outwardly accuse the content as being lies and slander, it’s generally accepted to be facts. Perhaps this is because no one here is really willing to admit that their memory just isn’t as perfect and leak-proof as they’d hope it to be. This thought carries easily into one’s reading of life narratives.

When reading a life narrative, it’s necessary to peel off that band-aid, no matter painful it may be, and reveal the truth for what it is. Memories do not equate facts. They are a perspective upon a fact and that perspective will go through so many stages of evolution that by the time you look back at it again, it may bear only the faintest whisper of resemblance to what it was before. Very much like a Pokemon. However this does not lessen its significance.

Thinking of Maus, Art Spiegelman is recording and depicting the story, partially from his memory, of himself interviewing his father, Vladek, about Vladek’s memories of the Holocaust. Their conversations were recorded upon tapes and just in that, the information is most likely solid but his confrontations with his father, the moment of the interviewing and how it happened for both father and son during those moments of interview are straight from Art’s own memory. Vladek’s memories of the Holocaust could hardly be exaggerated yet it is possible that between the time he experienced those horrors and the time he recounted them to his son, much of his perception about it may have changed. Art’s memory of how the real-world time passed during his interviews with Vladek may also have been changed slightly, a mental image blurred and affected by the information he received, as well as his relationship and feelings towards his father, all of which are not constants. The past, both of his father as well as his interactions with his father, meld with Art’s present of depicting what he has been told into what McGlothlin calls a “temporal blurring”.

This can be observed through Art’s depiction of his father’s memories. In one particular instance, he utilizes photographs, drawn to cascade down the page, completely disregarding the strict lines and boundaries of the panels and gutters he had followed to rigidly before. Photographs are used to remember one’s past, the history of one’s life and their journey down the page during the present moment of the page blurs together the two timelines. Art’s use of panels and gutters also help to break down the barrier between the past and the present. During a snippet of the interview, Art questions his father about a fellow prisoner by the name of Mandelbaum. The panel that depicts Mandelbaum’s fate is set in a traditional panel, blocked off by lines, almost as though the past is being trapped right where it is but this is thwarted by the text above the panel, the hat that breaks free of the panel lines to land partway out of it on the white of the gutter space and the Nazi guard’s speech bubble that is not trapped cleanly within the panel boundary lines and cross over with the present of Vladek telling the story to Art, a panel that is not given any panel lines. It look almost as though neither Art, as the artist nor Vladek as the narrator is able to truly reign in the past from invading into their present.

Yet this instance is only Vladek’s assumption of what might have happened, as he is never quite sure of what truly happened to Mandelbaum. It is part of his memory as well, but this memory is simply Vladek’s perspective upon the fact that is the context of his situation at the time of the Holocaust. In his mind, it was entirely likely that Mandelbaum’s fate was fixed by a German soldier. It might not be true but the fact that it is so much part of his memory that he would be able to remember it shows that it is every bit as significant as though it were true.

The ways in which Art displays his father’s memory through his own memory serves to show the questionable reliability of memory but also illustrates that lack of factual proof to validate every part of one’s memory does not equate a absence of significance and importance.