Can anyone think of books that contain two separate stories or two very different perspectives on the same story being told together? [closed]
Closed by System on Jan 6, 2016 at 01:14
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I fear that the question sounds vague and confusing, but I can't conjure up the words I need to say exactly what I mean without going into detail.
I thought it would be interesting to have two stories going on at the same time. The main story would be the events as they actually happened. It would be fairly straight forward stock fantasy style.
The second story would be someone several hundreds of years later in a modern time trying to tell someone else the same story. There are several things that were lost, added to or changed in in the telling. The story teller believes that the characters may have been based on real historic people, but it is likely the events were greatly exaggerated or never even happened at all. The story teller also believes that good and evil were very obvious and, simple and complete. In the "real" version, it's much more ambiguous. No one is really good or evil. The second story would be very short. Perhaps it is only a sentence or two long at the beginning of each chapter.
I think I've read a book or watched a movie set up like this. But I can't think of what it could have been. I'd like to know if anyone else might be able to think of an example of this situation so that I could find it. I'd like to read or watch it again to see how it was done.
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1) A similar but not exact iteration of this is the Water! trilogy by Gael Baudino. It's not well-known and I found the experimental format exhausting. Still, Your Mileage May Vary.
In the three books (O Greenest Branch, The Dove Looked In, Branch and Crown) there were three alternating narrative styles: parts were standard narration (typical sword-and-sorcery fantasy), then parts were being told by a marketing guy in the present day as his career collapsed and he went from Muckety-Muck to losing his job to getting mugged, and then parts were a stone-cutting manual which was increasingly crossed out and being used as a religious text.
The story parts didn't really overlap; each subsequent part of the story was told in the next style.
2) Something closer to what you're describing happened in two Star Trek: Voyager episodes, "Living Witness" and to a lesser extent "11:59." There are "present" events and then how the characters interpret those events from a distant future.
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The short story Titanium Mike Saves the Day is a series of five stories about a man named Titanium Mike, each told at a different time in human history.
It's free to read at the link above.
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I think the The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner may be the canonical example here. It has four sections in which many of the same events are related but from different — and unreliable — perspectives.
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