Truth has a nominative definition. It means it is a combination of the knowledge of truth and what makes the truth. In other terms, we cannot know the truth if we do not know where it comes from and its reasons. At least, this is Kant’s definition .
Truth is a vast subject which has encountered several definitions through times, no matter if we rather take an interest in philosophy or in literature. In fact, those definitions always meet at some point and find their oppositions which are interesting and open to more questions and so, definitions. Freud, for example, says that the love that we have for the truth is our way to recognize the existence of truth . It underlines the link between truth and reality. We could wonder if one can go without the other. It is more or less how Lacan’s words are reused in the dictionnaire de la psychanalyse. When someone says « I’m lying », where is the boundary between the truth and reality? Because if that person says the truth, then he is lying and lying is not telling the truth. It is the same for the other way around. Paradoxically, Lacan also said that the act of lying and betrayal are not the perfect opposition of truth.
Truth can be linked to the realism literary movement. It is a matter of discourse and not of truth itself.
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Fictions are as lies that we accept. As Tahar Ben Jelloun wrote in his book Le premier amour est toujours dernier : « Every fiction is a robbery of reality, and sometimes it comes back to it, it melts with it ». We know that the author is telling us about something that does not exist even if his research makes it more reliable. For a moment, we accept to believe in him and the boundary between truth and reality is getting more blurred. Stephen King once said “Fiction is the truth inside the lie” meaning that the whole story we are reading is a lie created by the author in order to make it the truth. This is what fiction is, even if it based on true