Every now and then, we are bound to ask ourselves the same question: why are we still reading novels?
The dictionary defines a novel as a relatively long work of narrative fiction. But a definition tells us what a novel is. It does not tell us what a novel does. Understanding can only begin when we choose to realise rather than memorise.
Long before we learned to write laws, we learned to tell stories. Fiction was never useless. It was one of the first tools human beings created to survive the world. Stories are what bring us together— socially, culturally, emotionally. I have met many people trapped in lives that feel too small, searching for an escape. An escape from headlines and hard facts, of the black and white world of newspapers. For them, and for me, novels do far more than simply make us believe that dragons exist. Escape is only the first step. What looks like distance is often perspective. We read not only to forget the world, but to return to it differently.
Through fiction, we can enter minds that not our own, times we have never seen and worlds that we may never reach. We feel the fears of people we have never met. We understand struggles we have never faced. In this way, fictions enlarges us. It stretches the boundaries of our own experience and shows us that the world is bigger than the one we know.
Human beings cannot live without turning their lives into stories. We build what psychologists call a narrative identity. We do not remember our past as a list of facts, but as a narrative with beginnings, conflicts, and turning points. This narrative identity too is never entirely our own. It is shaped by the cultural scripts we grow up with, from fables to family history, so that in the end, the story we build about ourselves is itself built from stories we have heard before.
We are all, thus, both authors and protagonists of our own lives, constantly arranging events into something that makes sense. Maybe that is why fiction feels natural to us. It speaks the language our minds already understand.
Fiction also keeps alive something that we risk losing as we grow older— idealism and the ability to imagine things could be different. The imagination ends up becoming a rehearsal stage for courage. Almost every story begins with a simple act of defiance against reality— what if? What if the world were braver, kinder, fairer, or stranger than the one we have settled for?
Every story carries the possibility of resistance. To imagine a different world is to question the one we already live in. Many modern novels seem somewhat preoccupied with “utopias” and “dystopias”— worlds that are either far better than the ones we live in or far worse. What is more unsettling is how closely they resemble our world with uncomfortable clarity. What we call fiction is sometimes not invention, but just a mirror held up to reality. History shows that the truths we live by today were once dismissed in the same way, as nothing more than utopian illusions, foolish desires or starry-eyed whims. Freedom, equality, justice— these too were once ideas that seemed unrealistic, until someone chose to imagine them seriously enough for the world to change.
We once believed in heroes, monsters, and miracles without asking for proof. But as we grew older, the world slowly became smaller, safer, and less surprising. We were taught to accept what is, rather than wonder what could be. Fiction resists that narrowing. In this way, stories protect a part of us that reality alone cannot sustain— the part that still believes that the world does not always have to remain the way we found it.
So, in conclusion, I leave you with a question. If we confine novels to making us believe that dragons exist, why do we not broaden our minds and stop to consider something else— is the true purpose of novels not to make us believe that dragons can be beaten?
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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