"Beautifil Truth or Truly Beautiful" Fall from Grace, Symbolism, Characterizations, Emotions, Faulkner-"A Rose for Emily", Steinbeck-"The Chrysanthemums", Hawthorne-" Young Goodman Brown"

Essay by keller5327University, Bachelor'sA+, April 2005

download word file, 9 pages 5.0

Downloaded 43 times

Beautiful Truth

Or

Truly Beautiful?

Truth and meaning are driving forces behind human nature. The response to emotions and the expression of them, are searched out and questioned in the observation of John Keats "Beauty is truth, Truth is Beauty." Upon first glance this is an easily acceptable insight. Casually, it is even a beautiful and wonderful sentiment. However at the core, the underlying issue, Keats is not offering a reflection. Instead he is posing the question; " What is it that you want?" Something beautiful, or do you seek the truth beneath the masquerade. Many people pick truth over beauty in a charade of nobility and righteousness, then stop at the pretty picture that has been painted, instead of scraping the colors away, to reveal the blank canvas beneath. What of those who choose beauty? Are they any less noble? No. To them, truth is found in what is beautiful to them.

It is in the eye of the beholder. Truth and beauty in both cases is found through the interpreter's frame of reference and acceptance. Unique and personalized to each individual, they are paradoxically similar and sundry. How then can a writer reach out and connect with his or her audience? He or she must appeal to the one thing that the audience has in common, human nature. Writers connect the audience to them and to each other by starting from the one thing that makes us all human, our Fall from Grace. Writers and authors use a variety of tools to accomplish this: symbolism in names and actions, love, pride and other basic emotions, and characterizations of good and evil.

While all of these are used to different extremes and set us on different paths they all start with the same first step. If a writer cannot...