Comparison Of All Over But The Shoutin And Freakonomics

While the the memoir All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg and the non-fiction Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner are vastly different books in most aspects written by people from complete different backgrounds with completely different jobs and while the books have completely different purposes they still have one thing in common. They both incorperate storytelling, they both have narrative accounts from multiple different people from different point of views and they are both true. Keep in mind that All Over But the Shoutin’ is based on a true story while Freakonomics revolves around facts however they are both considered true. How much of All Over But the Shoutin’ is actually true is unknown while Freakonomics is cited through out.

Starting with the first topic, what is storytelling? Well storytelling by definition is the conveying of events in words and images often by improvisation and embellishment. However is apperant in both of these books that is only partly true in the two instances at hand. Sure these books both heavily involve storytelling however as far as I am aware they are not embellished for the enhancement of the story. For
example in Freakonomics when the author is talking about the cheating on Standardized Testing in Chicago public schools, that was all true with sources to back it up rather than being enhanced for the purpose of further enjoyment. There is also several other examples throughout the book Freakonomics as All Over But the Shoutin’ and many other novels such as the time where the man studied drug dealers in Freakonomics.

Storytelling is used throughout basically every genre of writing in existence.
For example it is used in All Over But the Shoutin’ which is a memior (also very similar to a autobiography) when his mother and other relatives told him stories about how his father was since he didn’t see him much and wasn’t around him much throughout his life. Storytelling is also used in genres and books that are very different such as Freakonomics on the story about the teachers cheating in the Chicago Public School System as referanced in the previous paragraph.
Although storytelling is not only used in non-fiction by any means infact the majority of storytelling exists within fiction novels where often times the entire novel is one story. There is a countless number of novels where storytelling is a huge part of the piece of
literature.

Narratives play a very large function in the genre of non-fiction writing. Because a large part of figuring out the facts which are involved in non-fiction literature comes from personal accounts of people then they can find out if the narratives told by those people deem true or not. Another example of where narrative takes a huge part in non-fiction writing is in diarys. Diarys are essentially one big narrative, they are one persons account of the truth usually all the way through. Without narratives in non-fiction there would be no such thing as a diary in literature. However narratives are rarely part of fiction writing.

As you can tell from the previous paragraphs storytelling and narratives are a huge part of literature and literature simply wouldn’t be the same without them. Without storytelling in literature there would essentially be no such thing as memiors, autobiographys, or diarys therefore storytelling is undoubtedly a large part of literature as a whole.