The purpose of true narrative

The Killing of Crazy Horse tells the story of the death of one man, of the people who wished or tried to prevent his death, and of the world which his death helped bring to an end. As a book it falls into the category of non-fiction but it is neither a biography nor a history as traditionally understood. It is a narrative — the kind of story people tell to convey what they have experienced or suffered. The killing of Crazy Horse, like the dispossession of the Sioux of which it was a concluding episode, was a traumatic event for everyone involved — for the Oglala who lost a champion and leader, for the U.S. Army officers who hid or regretted their role in the killing, and for Americans who have questioned ever since whether it was an accident or a crime.

What a narrative conveys best is the feel of experience — the impact and resonance of the event described. True narrative is an old term, often used in the 17th and 18th centuries for accounts of religious persecution, disasters at sea, captivity by Indians, appalling murders and the like. An entirely typical example would be Deodat Lawson’s A Brief and True Narrative Of some Remarkable Passages Relating to Sundry Persons Afflicted by Witchcraft, at Salem Village Which happened from the Nineteenth of March, to the Fifth of April, 1692.

“True narrative” as a term to describe a type of writing has been long neglected but it can be retrieved for a modern purpose. We might, but should not, linger over the question whether we can ever know that something is true. Here it is enough to say that a true narrative is intended to be true, that its writer believes it is true, and at the very least that it is not demonstrably false. It is a narrative, and not an extended argument or a repository of information, because the writer’s primary purpose is to convey the quality of the event — its emotional texture — as it was experienced by those who lived through it. True narrative, then, is a literary genre properly placed about equidistant between history and the novel.