By Prakhar Shukla
Fiction is an exercise in lying—we create a fake world, populated by fake people living fake lives. But right there, in the middle of all the lies, lies the kernel of truth.
This sentence strikes at the heart of the paradox that has both haunted and fascinated philosophers, writers, and readers for centuries. Fiction is fundamentally untrue—its events fabricated, its characters inventions, its settings often entirely unreal. And yet, no other medium speaks so precisely to the depths of human experience. The lie is the form; the truth is its content. At its essence, fiction is the art of telling the truth through falsehoods. From the earliest myths to modern psychological novels, fiction has always worn the mask of fantasy, only to gesture toward the real.
Long before novels, before printed books, before the formal division of genres, we had stories. Ancient epics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, composed over 4,000 years ago, already demonstrated fiction’s capacity to touch upon grief, the fear of death, the longing for immortality, and the pain of losing a friend. Enkidu’s death in Gilgamesh is not simply a narrative device—it is an emotional earthquake that ripples across millennia, because it expresses an unchanging truth: to love is to risk loss. Gilgamesh’s desperate journey in search of eternal life is fiction, yes, but in it we see the universal human struggle with mortality.
Consider also Homer’s Odyssey, a fantastical journey full of monsters, gods, and enchantresses. No one has ever truly sailed past Scylla and Charybdis, nor heard the Sirens’ song—but Odysseus’s wanderings become a metaphor for homecoming, for endurance, for identity, and for the long and twisted road back to oneself. Fiction, even at its most allegorical and absurd, provides us with an architecture to understand inner movements of the soul.
In classical Sanskrit literature, we see the Kathasaritsagara, a vast ocean of tales within tales—folk stories, courtly romances, riddles, philosophical dialogues—all anchored in invented characters and fabulous situations. But through these stories, the ancient Indian imagination conveyed ethical dilemmas, the nature of duty, and the complexities of fate. Truth does not demand realism.
Even in later canonical Western literature, we find this same dialectic between the invented and the eternal. Cervantes’ Don Quixote parodies chivalric romance through its delusional protagonist, and yet, paradoxically, becomes one of the most moving portrayals of idealism and madness. The character is a fool, but he is also all of us—tilting at windmills in a world that seems increasingly devoid of poetry.
Fiction operates in the strange interstice between what is and what might be. It is here that it becomes more than mere entertainment—it becomes formative. Aristotle, in his Poetics, argued that poetry (which included drama and fiction in his taxonomy) was more philosophical than history. Why? Because history tells us what did happen; fiction tells us what could or should happen. It deals not with particulars, but with universals. A historical account might describe a king’s fall. A tragedy like Oedipus Rex explains why hubris leads to ruin—not only for one man, but for all who refuse to see.
Fictional stories, then, are not just untrue. They are structured lies, curated illusions—deliberate imitations of action that aim to provoke catharsis, the purging of pity and fear. And this is not an accident. Writers sit at the boundary between the factual and the fantastic, and their craft lies in creating emotional reality within narrative artifice.
How is it, for instance, that readers grow anxious for a character’s safety, even when—logically—they know that a protagonist halfway through the book is unlikely to die? Part of the answer lies in suspension of disbelief, a term coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who argued that if a writer could create “human interest and a semblance of truth,” the reader would overlook the story’s unreality. But it is more than that. Fiction’s power does not come from tricking us into thinking the events are real. Rather, it emerges from its ability to mimic the structure of emotional life.
In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert famously said, “Emma Bovary, c’est moi.” A male writer, writing a woman, writing a life of unfulfilled desire and romantic delusion, and yet readers across time, gender, and geography have found Emma achingly real. Why? Because what fiction does so expertly is not portray reality, but to render interiority. Emma’s disillusionment, her longing for something more than the provincial life, her fall into fantasy and despair—all are expressed not through grand philosophical statements, but through gesture, tone, rhythm, and detail. Flaubert does not tell us the truth; he makes us feel it.
And feeling is central. Fiction is not an intellectual argument—it is a simulation of experience. Characters may be fictional, but our emotional responses to them are real. When Anna Karenina throws herself onto the tracks, we feel the weight of repression, loneliness, the collapse of a human spirit under societal judgment. We know Tolstoy wrote her fate—but we mourn her as though she were a friend.
Writers play a delicate game: they know we know it’s not real, and yet they ask us to feel as though it were. They manipulate time, pacing, and language; they seed just enough unpredictability, just enough narrative danger, to make us forget—if only for a page or two—that the outcome has already been written.
Fiction’s truth is not always beautiful. Often, it is grotesque, uncanny, painful. Kafka’s Metamorphosis begins with a man waking up as a giant insect. What could be less plausible? And yet the story captures the profound sense of alienation, of being dehumanized by family and work and the cold machinery of modern life. The truth of Metamorphosis is not biological, but existential.
Fiction also becomes a space where moral complexities can be explored without the pressure of definitive answers. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a case in point. Each of the brothers represents a philosophical stance—faith, reason, sensuality—and the novel becomes a battlefield of ideas as much as a story. Through these invented characters, Dostoevsky does not argue a thesis; he stages a debate within the psyche of humanity itself.
The reader is not asked to side with any one brother, but to wrestle with all of them. And this is the ethical dimension of fiction: it forces us into the skin of others, even when they are contradictory, flawed, even repulsive. We may not agree with Raskolnikov’s justifications for murder in Crime and Punishment, but we are made to understand his mental labyrinth. Fiction offers us empathy without endorsement.
In the end, fiction’s greatest truth may lie in its ability to reflect not what the world is, but what it feels like to live within it. We turn to novels not for facts, but for insight; not for accuracy, but for understanding. We lie to ourselves with fiction—and yet in doing so, we discover the truths we are otherwise too guarded, too rational, or too weary to face head-on. It is the lie that saves us.
The writer stands on the edge of the real and the imagined, manipulating symbols and silhouettes, carefully balancing on the tightrope of truth and illusion. And the reader, knowingly complicit, willingly falls into the lie—only to emerge, somehow, more whole, more human.
Because in the invented lives of fictional characters, we are offered not escape from reality, but a return to it—with eyes that see more clearly.
Support our Journalism
Whether you live in Australia, the UK, Canada, the USA or India, you can take a paid subscription by clicking on Patreon and support honest and fearless journalism.
