ABSTRACT
In Malone Dies, Malone seems at moments to believe that his every word might sensibly be considered a lie. It might seem to follow fairly quickly from this observation that Malone's world is one about which it is not possible for him to be mistaken, and that thus, his claim to permanent veracity is false, but trivially so. Despite such uncertainty, the possibility of lying, and the at-least potential value of a concomitant veracity, run deeply through the entire Trilogy. The latter possibility that reality is resistant to description pervades the text of the novel at micro and macroscopic levels, within the stories Malone tells and in his increasingly confused meditations on himself. In some sense, Malone's failed storytelling is a reductio ad absurdum of the drive to honesty and authenticity. Fiction, in other words, could have been the salutary application of lying to the self about whom accuracy and truth seem to matter so overwhelmingly.
