Truth In A Streetcar Named Desire

The notion of truth comes up in many contexts, including philophy, science, and religion. Naturally, it is discussed in literature too. In The Bluest Eye and A Streetcar Named Desire, the reader in invited to reflect on this concept throught the different characters, who each have a different way of dealing with their very own vision of the “truth”.

The

But not all characters deal with reality the same way, and, most importantly, not all characters consider the truth as purely realitity. Truth is a more complex things, and depends on education and personal experience.

In A Streetcar Named Desire, there’s a clear difference between how different characters see the truth according to their social background. Characters who represent the

When Stanley discovers Blanche's past as a prostitute (or, at least, promiscuous), after actively looking for it, he feels entitled to expose her to the world, in this case Stella and Mitch, or else he would feel like lying to them. He then presents Blanche's past to Stella, in scene 7, not as a story but as a deconstruction of her different lies or omission of truth ; “lie number one […] lie number two”. This speech structure shows that he doesn't see the truth as something in itself, but rather as an absence of lies or omissions. He proves the lies wrong in order to create a clearer, more accurate picture of the reality. The only way someone can be truthful, according to Stanley, is by saying the whole truth and only that. Mitch feels the same way ; upon learning about Blanche's past, he confronts her and accuse her of having only said “lies, lies, inside and out, all lies”: if Blanche has lied, it means that she cannot be trusted about anything, and therefore everything she has ever said is to be assumed a lie,

We see that, much like Stanley, the narrator Claudia and her sister Frieda are in a constant search for the truth. This is observed in their younger selves ; when they can't understand their mother's conversation, they “look for truth in timbre”, showing that before all what matters to them isn't the beauty of the whate is said or the poetry in it but if it is truthful, relevant to their quest of the complete and pure reality. In the older Claudia, the one that narrates the story, this quest is shown in the prologue, in which it is explicitely said that she “must take refuse in how”, meaning that the only way for her to find peace after all these years is to know the truth, which is once again the factual complete reality of what happened. To these characters, truth, knowing the facts rather than understanding the “why”, is what can set them free. Finding it and revealing it becomes their main motivation. For The Bluest Eye, it is even the reason for which the narrator writes the