What is fiction?

I agree with what most of he people said below in that it’s not really important to know what’s true in a fictional book. After all, that’s not the purpose of fiction. The purpose of any fictional book is to entrance the reader and make him experience the feelings the author wants him to experience. O’ Brien wanted the reader to experience war as realistically as possible; hence he gave the book a realistic spin. As far as I’m concerned, that’s still as fictional as fiction can get. “Reality fiction” is what I would call it =) It’s possible that he took certain incidents that did happen during the war and exaggerated them in order for the reader to understand the emotions/feelings behind it better.

As to the whole Oprah scandal (a little off-topic), I agree that just the fact that the book was fictional doesn’t take away its credibility. However, I think the fact that the author publicly claimed that the book WAS based on reality is rather deceptive. If the author had so much faith in what he was writing and if he wanted to simply get the emotions across, he, as an author, should know that a fictional book can do that as much or even more than a non-fiction one. Lying in a book is called fiction but lying in real life..that’s deception. Just my personal point of view.