I’ve been told by poetry instructors, when writing about a specific term, to write the term over and over and over again until you’ve distilled all of the riding luggage the word carries from the true meaning and sensation of the term.

I’ve been prompted to write about the true truth of Faith Healer, a series of monologues written by Brian Friel centered around the events of the life of a traveling sideshow faith healer. The question, with all due respect, is folly.

The beautiful thing about literature is that it is not a court of law. Literature does not deal in objective truth, but in human experience. We’re not interested in “facts”, or, at least, we shouldn’t be, so much as we are interested in the human reaction to them. Even in life, although there are facts at the center of our world, there are many truths to those facts. This is especially pertinent in Northern Ireland. There are a limited number of facts about Irish history that I could give you; one such fact would be that Bobby Sands died due to a prolonged hunger strike in the Her Majesty’s Prison Maze on May 5th, 1981. But there are infinitely many truths that exist from that fact, the most obnoxiously contrasting of which would be that both a national hero and a maligned terrorist died that day. Both are real in their own way; all that is different between people that hold these truths is a matter of experience.

So, to ask which of the three characters from the play is telling the “truth” is a presentation of a false choice. Even in a fictional context, each character owns a true experience to a set of stable facts. And there is no reason to suspect that any character in Faith Healer isn’t telling their truth.