[While] we have only one life, nevertheless that one life (that massive datum, John Updike calls it in his memoir Self-Consciousness) lends itself to any number of stories — and I'm speaking here not of fabrications but of sincere, straightforward factual accounts. Another way to put it is that any life's story can be told in any number of ways, depending on the teller's handle, or angle of view, or lens. In fact, of course, the same applies to fictional characters: people made out of words in a novel or words and images on a screen.
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About John Barth
John Barth was a 20th-century American writer. John Simmons Barth was an American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history; Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world; and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. Read more on Wikipedia →