SOCIAL STANDARDS REGARDING TRUTH AND LIES AS DEPICTED IN LITERATURE: VERACITIES AND FALSEHOODS IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Human society is an intricate mechanism – one which functions based on a set of rules that are synchronically fix and flexible. Humans have forever desired to make the differentiation among themselves and other beings, and among the structures that have been taken into account as markers of superiority to the nonhuman presences there are the set truth-lies and art and religion.How much truth and how much untruth is involved in art and religion represents an endless discussion just as much as where is the borderline between facts and fiction – but there can be no doubt when affirming that such a writer as Flannery O’Connor has, through her artistic outcomes, depicted majestically the complex and confusing relation among all these “man-made” constructs that give our nature specificity. Some literary works, purloined letters, might not even try very hard to mask the truth(s) – the facts are there to be seen by those wishing to look with an insightful eye. Yet, the most obvious is rarely easy to capture, just as much as the simple is always hard to depict. It takes a great writer to artfully reveal truths and lies, by hiding them in plain sight, in such a way that the reader needs stop and reflect. O’Connor’s work represents a bewildering exploration of human existence, onewhich most clearly reveals the frailty of life in an environment created with the aid of religious precepts claiming to distinguish between universal veracity and absolute falsehood. If reading Flannery one might not resolutely distinguish between truth and lies,at least one will have understood that there is more to reality than meets the eye.