The Elephant Man

Ashley Montagu

When I am next moved can I go to a blind asylum or to a lighthouse?

He did not like to discuss it as a play but rather as a vision of some actual world. When this mood possessed him he would say: I wonder what the prince did after we left? Or Do you think that poor man is still in the dungeon? And so on and so on.

The tales were very real to him, as real as any narrative in the Bible, so that he would tell them to me as incidents in the lives of people who had lived. In his outlook upon the world he was a child, yet a child with some of the tempestuous feelings of a man.

The Elephant Man is one of the most interesting characters I have yet heard of. And he is real. Or it is a agreed that he existed. Or there was a life lived of someone close to the description of the Elephant Man.
A great reader of romances in his later days, it is said that he did not distinguish the fiction from the fact. Should he have? I have a sneaking suspicion that not very many of us can distinguish the fiction from fact. We simply enjoy the fiction that we can. Names, titles, sentence structure, words, interpretations, etc., all these things help to put fiction into our factual realities. We ourselves go busily about creating fictions of our own existence in order to become more appealing to the people we like, in order to seem more suited for the positions we want to occupy in society. Why should it be so strange to us that the arbitrary denomination of a certain story as fact and all the rest as fiction, is itself fiction?
The Elephant Man didn't resemble an Elephant in the least. It is said that he acquired that show name because of the way his mouth was deformed. But more, he acquired the name because it was exotic and would bring people in. The Misshapen Man doesn't have the same ring, despite it's alliteration.