D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel - a Postmodern View: Creative and Critical Power of Imaginary Narrative
             In this essay, I treat D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel as a kind of 'imaginary false document'. In a rigid scientific view, literary works or any artistic works are special types of false document, which would not help us discover so-called 'truth'. E.L. Doctorow argues that literary narratives, including novels, poetry and drama, are kinds of false document. However they have enough capability of revealing intuitive and creative truth better than any scientific and official documents do: 'false documents [are] more valid, more real, more truthful than the "true" documents of the politicians or the journalists or psychologists' . While he emphases on the imaginative power of literary narratives, Doctorow is against a discriminating hierarchy between scientific and imaginative narrative.
             False documents have an equal significance to 'imaginary ' narratives. In a postmodern sense, we cannot insist exclusively on the superiority between scientific and imaginative narratives; they are just different literary genres - different forms of same 'imaginary order'. To be a scientific or to be an imaginative narrative could mean not so much the different level of quality, credibility and reality as that of form or structure of the 'imaginary' narrative. Hayden White argues that historical narratives always justify their scientific methods of writing historical narratives, but all these historical writings are made of imaginary (allegorical, imaginative and literary) constructions. According to White, these imaginary narratives are equally capable in representing and revealing 'truthfulness', for scientific and historical narratives 'must be regarded as a kind of allegory – a history of nature meant to be understood literary but appeal...