Amalgamation of Fact and Fiction in Govinda Raj Bhattarai’s Socrates’ Footsteps

Abstract

This project focuses on Govinda Raj Bhattarai’s Socrates’ Footsteps, a story of a young boy, Ananta frustrated by socio-political violence. On the surface the novel appears to be the journey of a young man from his village to Kathmandu, but in the reality it is a tale which manages to blur the boundary between fact and fiction. The novel is the fictionalalization of those facts which occurred during the period of Maoist insurgency. By blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, the novel attempts to document the histories which are not considered significant in official history and through this novel the history of marginalized people isbrought inthe form of fiction. Moreover, the study also aims at establishing the importance of factual evidences while fictionalizing it.