: Re: Is it bad for the narrative to lie? What I want to know is if it is bad for the narrative to lie to the reader. I get that using it in first person can be a good use for misdirection

@LarsenBagley300

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As Alexander stated in comments, the classic Kurasawa film Roshomon's plot centers around a disturbing court case where three separate people confess to the same crime and each one's confession is impossible to reconcile with each other and all three are not trust worthy. The trial portions of the film are shot so that the audience is in the position of a judge and the actors answer the questions as if they were asked by a participating audience (it's possible to even script questions to ask to recieve the actor's next response... and it's shot like Dora the Explorer where the actors pause to listen to the question and respond... a very very dark Dora the Explorer).

As stated, the disturbing nature of the case is that unlike a typical mystery, it's not to honest people and a liar claiming innocence, but 2 dishonest people and a honest person claiming guilt in the crime. And all three are given very plausible reasons to not be trusted (the highway robber is clearly trying to up his reputation as a dangerous criminal and his story casts him as a heroic rogue, the Samurai's wife is clearly playing to the period's sterotypes of women and was often depicted manipulating the robber and the samurai's emotions and maybe trying this in courtroom testimony, and the medium is channeling the spirit of the Samurai for his own story and can't be trusted before you even get to the Samurai's story where his time line of events is conflicts with the other two. Even the murder weapon is in dispute, with the thief using his sword, while the wife used the missing daggar and later tossed it into the ocean and the Samurai/Medium claiming he used it to kill himself, but it was removed after he had died and the spirit claims he felt it being removed, but did not know who removed as he was too far gone.

And then it turns out that even the facts of the case are in dispute as a witness that established the accepted portions of the timeline had been lying about what he saw because he committed a separate crime to the Samurai's murder. Kurosawa himself refused to confirm which of the four stories was true to fact and leaves it up to the audience to figure out for themselves. The whole film discusses the rational for why people lie, and deliberitly points out that lying to implicate one's self as the only guilty party in a murder makes no logical sense.

In literature in general, the plot device of a Red Herring is an element of the plot that is set up to shift suspicions from the real perpetrator of the mystery of the plot by showing the Red Herring acting in a mannor that superficially appears suspicious and is a well known plot device in mystery novels.

On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, one episode deals with why the exiled Cardassian Garrak was exiled from Cardassia. During the episode, Garrak gives three stories about his war buddy Elim where Garrak's actions ended his career (something along the lines of Garrak took sympathy on some war orphans and tried to stop Elim from killing them and was exiled for disobeying an order OR Garrak commited the war crime (though the circumstances were different) and Elim outted him, then Garrak was homesick and neglected his duties, and the "war orphans" were really terrorist he could have stopped from an attack that killed Elim). At the end, the person who heard the stories learns that not only were all three false, but Elim never existed (it's really Garrack's first name) and when the character calls Garrak out on the lie and demands to know which of the three stories was true, Garrak responds with "My dear doctor, they're all true... especially the lies." A later episode even plays with this where Garrak is asked about the circumstances surrounding his exile, which he says it was all for Tax Evasion, which no one buys for a second... nor does Garrak expect them too.

Of course, if we want to get really Meta in our answer than the answer must be that story writers are expected to lie as a matter of course. After all, what is fiction but a series of events that definitely did not happen? You're always lying to the reader... it's just a very consistent lie.

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