There is Nothing New Under the Sun

According to Foster, all “writing and telling belong to one big story,” because ultimately, there is only one story about the human experience.  Literature attempts to encompass these struggles and experiences as a way to understand the world around us. Naturally, they all slightly vary from one another because the human experience is so complex.  Differences in race, environment, class, and etc. have a profound effect on our quality of life and cause us all to have varying experiences that still share a few commonalities.  Foster emphasized that writers borrow from their experiences when writing stories which are essentially the same.  This explains why it is so easy to trace stories back to one another, notice similar themes, and why all writing belongs to “one big story.”  Our attempt to make sense of the world and things around us continues to be a topic of discussion. Everything we have to say about it will be more or less the same.  Literature is one medium of this.  Although there a numerous books that all vary in plot and characters, many of them hold similar themes such as the loss of innocence, the American dream, a character’s internal struggle with himself, a possible dystopian world, and an overall observation of our society’s current ideals or environments, and practically everyone is writing about it in hopes that they might understand it better. In fact, they really aren’t writing about anything new.  According to Foster, part of becoming a professional reader is being more aware of this.