The conflict between illusion and reality in Laurent Gaudé’s play “The Great Liar”

The study aims at answering a central question: Does lying in the play “Le Grand Menteur”, “The Great Liar” by the French writer Laurent Gaudé, constitute a moral deviation from the truth, or does it become an existential mechanism for self-reconstruction in a world devoid of meaning? This study adopts a methodological approach drawing on critical, philosophical, and existentialist methods, alongside integrated analytical tools, to examine the three dramatic texts that form the structure of the world and bind its characters in complex relationships. The study reached a series of conclusion, the most important of which is that the play transcends the traditional binary between truth and falsehood, it suggests that human identity is a choice rather than a given meaning?, and that for the marginalized the individual, illusion is transformed into a form of dignity and freedom, the study also concludes that love alone represents the absolute truth that stands beyond the realm of fabrication and falsification, whilst the lie, in its creative and existential sense, remains a refined form of human resistance against a world that has no room for dreams and does not do realize justice to those on the margins DOI: https://doi.org/10.69513/jnfh.v4.i2.a10 ©Authors, 2026, College of Education, Alnoor University.This is an open-access article under the CC BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).