"An Occurrence at Owl Creek"

After the exercise in Tuesday’s class, I began to really think about our ability to lie as human beings. It is intriguing that, after watching 30 some odd people lie, not everyone has the same expertise in the field of lying.

Those who do not have a knack for lying, I have found, can usually be weeded out from the rest of the pack simply based on their body movements. Whether it was rocking back on their chair, their inability to look anyone in the eye, their hands fidgeting with their pencil and paper, or even a smile rising to their lips, it was a sign that they were hiding something and they knew it. As for those who found a way to fog the line between fact and fiction, I believe that few of them actually have the ability to make, and present, a masterful lie. Going through each student, it became obvious that many of us (my self included) did not “truly” lie, but rather slightly twisted a story from our lives in order to create a memory that seems to come from a historical-fiction section of our brain.

I believe that cgieger hit this point perfectly when he/she (sorry did not see a name) stated that it is this combination of fact and fiction that made these lies harder to detect. This is the reason that most people tell lies that involve some truth in them.

The fact that it is easier to create a “truthful lie,” comes from similar reasoning as stated by Sabrina. She stated that her inability to lie streams from the fact that she had been taught, from an early age, that lying was morally bad. Because most humans have this understanding that lying is bad, we tend to hide our lies within truths in order to convince ourselves that the lie is not a lie. Once we are able to do this, we do not feel the moral pressure that comes from lying, and thus we are satisfied. The creation of liars, I believe, comes from mastering of this technique.

While this technique may seem immoral, it is sometimes used in a positive manner. Similar to the man in An Occurrence at Owl Creek, humans tend to convince themselves that a lie is reality in order to momentarily save himself or herself from some sort of pain. Author Ambrose Bierce shows this during the last minutes of Peyton Farquhar’s life. Dying by the noose, listening to the unbearable sharpness of his ticking watch and watching the lifeless pieces of wood slowly drift down the river, Farquhar changes what he believes is reality in order to dull the pain of death. While this quick life he lives is a lie, it is one that allows him to progressively come to peace with death. Unfortunately, like many people find, reality is reality and eventually we are forced to come face to face with it.