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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Can fiction tell a truth that is not literally true? In her March 15, 2025, essay for Scroll.in, writer Tishani Doshi explores that question through a corrected childhood memory, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and recurring images of doors, caves, darkness and light. Her argument is not that facts do not matter: the facts of her memory are corrected, while its emotional force remains.
What Doshi means by the “truthfulness” of truth
Doshi’s essay begins with a memory she once understood as her own: as a child, she believed she had been locked in a bathroom and remembers the fear of being unable to open the door. Years later, her mother and sister tell her that it was her younger brother Ajay, who has Down Syndrome, who had been locked in. Doshi accepts their account as true. Yet the remembered fear—and her distrust of doors—persists.
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The distinction matters. Doshi does not use the episode to argue that memory makes factual correction irrelevant. Instead, she considers how a corrected account and a lasting emotional experience can coexist. The memory’s factual subject changes; the fear it evokes does not simply disappear. Her essay asks what kinds of truth an account can carry beyond a literal record of events.
Why Kafka’s The Metamorphosis matters
Doshi’s clearest literary example is Kafka’s story of Gregor Samsa, who wakes to find himself transformed into an insect. Its impossible premise is not a factual report. For Doshi, however, that transformation makes alienation and family rejection visible in a heightened form: fiction alters the apparent facts to approach a reality that may otherwise be hard to express directly.
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Doors extend that idea through the story. Gregor is isolated and shut away; the threshold becomes a barrier between him and his family, as well as a filter on who can see or reach him. Doshi reads the doors in Kafka alongside her own remembered fear, not as proof that the two experiences are identical, but as an image through which separation and vulnerability can be approached.
She describes fiction as a search rather than a ready-made answer: “In fiction, there is a groping toward that which cannot be known immediately.” The claim is Doshi’s literary position. It suggests that a story can disclose emotional or social meaning without becoming a literal account of events.
Two directions for seeking truth: outward and inward
In the essay’s next movement, Doshi links truth with revelation—what is no longer hidden—and develops a chain of images around thresholds, caves, shadows, darkness and light. She contrasts two metaphors for seeking truth:
| Image in Doshi’s essay | Direction of movement | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| Plato’s cave | Outward, toward the light | Leaving shadows behind to approach what has been concealed. |
| Caves associated with Indian mystics in Doshi’s framing | Inward, into darkness | Turning toward concealment and interior exploration as part of the search. |
These are interpretive contrasts in Doshi’s essay, not a full account of either Plato or Indian traditions. They are also not presented as mutually exclusive doctrines. Their different directions help her question whether truth must always be imagined as something reached by leaving darkness, or whether looking inward can also be a way of seeking.
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Caves, images and the act of uncovering
Doshi turns to caves as places of both shelter and concealment, then considers prehistoric image-making as a way art can connect the distant past with the present. She invokes Bhimbetka and John Berger’s writing about Chauvet as part of this reflection. These references support her interest in images as traces across time, rather than serving as an empirical argument about what those images mean.
Her account also recalls a Rig Veda story in which Indra releases dawn light and cows from a cave. Doshi reads the episode through the flash of a thunderbolt and the power of utterance. In this sequence, revelation need not arrive as a plain declaration: it can come through an image, a poem or an act of opening what was hidden.
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When public words lose their shared meaning
In the essay’s final movement, Doshi turns to the present, invoking the pandemic’s aftermath, war and climate anxiety. She worries about public language and images being manipulated until words such as “truth” lose their shared meaning. As she puts it, “If you say a word long enough or loud enough you can coopt that word and steal its meaning.”
Her concern is not merely that one falsehood may replace one true statement. It is the possibility that people become unmoored from a common sense of reality: “Not because lie has replaced truth, but because nobody believes anything any longer.” The distinction returns the essay to its opening memory. Factual correction still matters, but a shared account of reality can be weakened when language itself becomes unreliable.
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Doshi ends by turning toward imagination, attention to bodies and the present, and the possibility of making again from the beginning. She does not offer a simple definition that settles the nature of truth. “And truth, in its true nature, is hiding from me, resisting any kind of definition,” she writes. The essay’s answer is instead a way of attending: keep facts and feeling in view, notice what has been hidden, and remain open to forms of expression that can bring difficult realities into sight.
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