Self-deception and the experience of fiction

Sartre's commentary on bad faith is the starting-point for an exploration of self-deception: what it is not, what it is, and whether it's always wrong. The proffered analysis of self-deception parallels a certain theory of our experience of fiction. In essence, it is argued that the self-deceiver creates a kind of fiction in which he is a character, a fiction that he nonetheless believes to be real.