Should fiction be required reading? (a GRE practice essay question)

Since I have been considering going back to get my Master's Degree in English or Creative Writing (Poetry), specifically an MFA, I was looking through an online practice test for a GRE through the library website and came up with this essay based on one of the practice questions they had there. I thought it was a good essay, so I thought I'd post it here.

Should fiction be a required form of reading? We should then ask - should society study truth at all? For as Ralph Waldo Emerson so eloquently put it, “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” Non-fiction is of course the bare truth, if it is told truthfully and factually that is, but fiction reveals truths that are sometimes hidden by 'facts.' In fact, as another great literary/philosophical person once said, 'Give a man a mask and he will reveal the truth.' So, fiction is in fact that mask that will reveal the truths of society that we so need to hear and understand.

Thus it is my contention that of course fiction should be required reading. Not only is fiction part of the greatest world literature, but it also reflects truths that society as a whole needs to learn as I mentioned. I mean, think about it, what if we were never required to read Plato's 'The Cave' or Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear or Romeo and Juliet or Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night's Dream? What if we had never read Voltaire's "Candide", Sartre's "No Exit," Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, Hugo's Les Miserables or Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Bronte's Wuthering Heights? How bland and flat would our thoughts be then...? If we cannot think big thoughts, we do tend to become small. Oh yes, children and adults might eventually wander to these books on their own, but what if they did not? Then what..? Is that not the purpose of schools, education and teachers? To point the way to these great works of literature, harbingers of truth?

As another great literary figure said, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Major Colombian novelist and short-story writer, 1982 Nobel Prize for literature, b.1928), "Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”

Fiction is as old as time itself, from the first day that primordial man finished his hunting for the day and the woman and perhaps also the man prepared the food and they had time to sit around the fire in the cave or under the stars and began telling tales. Fiction was born! The truth is that fiction should not only be required reading, the fact is that fiction, or truth disguised and masked, is a vital and integral part of life and the question should not be 'should fiction be required reading, the question should be ‘what fiction should be required reading?’ The question should be not if, but what.

Copyright Elizabeth Aralica 2008 (that's me)
Do not use without permission! That would be plagiarism!

pla-gia-rism
  [pley-juh-riz-uhm, -jee-uh-riz-] Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1.
the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.