The truth is all lies

It took me awhile to understand why Beckett subtly lies to you throughout his novel, and for what reason could he find this advantageous, unless of course he finds truth in the duplicitous lives of the characters in his novels. And if you take a second to consider this, at first you may feel overwhelmingly pessimistic about life and who the people you know actually are. Do people I run into on the street or campus actually have an interior perspective on life as jaded as Moran, or as deceitful as Molloy? Are my close friends struggling with this double-consciousness? And who are these people really deceiving during these inner-monologues beyond themselves..and myself. The paucity (scarceness!) of truth in Molloy resembles that of a pathological liar, and then a light flickers in your head and you begin to understand the reason for the characters deceit, Beckett projects onto them another side of truth, wrapped up in lies. Where Joyce includes everything in Finnegans Wake Beckett empties all out, (Kenosis!!) so naturally a little hyperbole is necessary to keep the readers attention, even though Moran goes out of his way to tell you there will be none of this, "And in the main I observe it. And with such zeal that I am far more he who finds than he who tells what he has found, now as then, most of the time, I do not exaggerate" (126). Moran doesn't exaggerate, he lies outright and tells us while doing it no less, "it would not surprise me if I deviated, in the pages to follow, from the true and exact succession of events" (128). "When I said I had turkeys, and so on, I lied" (122). "It was not midnight, it was not raining." Beckett is writing in the modernist era, during a time when the rapid growth of industry is beginning to alienate people where once they felt optimistic. During this time, you can understand the anxiety Beckett has from modern advancements and influences by his contemporaries such as Joyce. And while Joyce focuses on themes such as eternal recurrence, Beckett can explore the ever growing themes of separation, and the declining ages which is causing people to become more deceitful in an attempt to keep up with the changes happening around them.