Fiction v. Non-Fiction

The thing I was most struck about the stories by Kis were that they were based more or less on historical events, or at least, they were given a context (like actual dates, etc). Hoe does this change how we feel about the stories and the characters? The Damned Yard was a fiction political metaphor while these stories are all non-fictional political metaphors. How does that change how we think about self, when it's less of an abstract concept but placed in a time and place that we can envision.