its own reward

It's been said that everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues. Mine, without a doubt, is honesty. In general, I suppose, honesty is a desirable characteristic in the person who's telling us a story, especially if the story has no independent existence outside the words we're reading. I have to admit, though, that for what seems like an unduly long time I was enamored of unreliable narrators, a kind of My Last Duchess syndrome, where the stories I liked best, whatever their ostensible content, were really about deception and self-deception.

I gave a lot of thought to exactly how an author was able to signal the gap between what we were told and what we should believe, to how fiction could contain layers of truths, where we read a false story and, through it, could dimly make out the outlines of the true story, though, strictly speaking, because both stories were imaginary, neither one was true. Taken to its logical extreme, this becomes what's known as the Rashomon effect -- where it's not so much that the storyteller is not telling the truth, but that there is no such thing as truth and, therefore, all narrators are unreliable.

Still, I tend to think of myself as honest. Of course, it's easy to consider yourself truthful when you're surrounded by liars. My job is, on the surface, anyway, all about truth, about discovering truth, about separating truth from lies. I spend my time asking people long and complicated questions. "And then what happened?" I say, "Just tell me the truth." But they seldom do and I can't really blame them. The reason that they're talking to me is almost always because they have to and it's not as if the truth is likely to benefit them.

Here's what I've learned: those who are convinced of their own stories make the best witnesses; honest people tend to be hesitant, to correct themselves, to restate facts in slightly different ways, to misremember details. The general rule is that the more confident the speaker and the more convincing the story, the less likely it is to be true. But in considering this, take into account that I'm afflicted with what someone once called "the naivete of the cynical." I'm so sure that other people are dishonest that I'm deceived when they tell the truth.