Week 5: Is William K Really Telling the Truth?

For this week's post I wanted to focus a little bit on embellishments in the novel and how they effect the narrator and the audience. William K seems to be the embellisher to Valentino when they were kids and Valentino drags that out in his stories. In Chapter 14, William K is telling his story of survival to Valentino and he seems to know right away that he is bending the truth a little bit when it comes to the things that have happened. For example, "Dut seemed immediately to know that William was a fabricator, though a harmless one"(191). William K's fabrications may be a way to make his story more of a "tearjerker" than anyone else's story. William K doesn't necessarily have the worst stories on earth, but he puts the embellishments in there to make them seem more important than that of Valentino or for anyone else for that matter. But, William K is not the only one that provides fabrications for this book because the narrator himself admits to using his own fabrications to stories in the book. For instance, "Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want, and that means making them as shocking as possible. My own story includes enough small embellishments that I cannot criticize the accounts of others"(21). The narrator has not room to judge William K if he himself is telling wild stories himself. But these small embellishments that he provides in the story of this book seem to be worked in quite naturally because I don't notice them that much. William K has the right to "work up" his stories a little bit because he has indeed been through this just like Valentino and these stories are no laughing matter.