The Speaker
In "The Liar," the speaker is characterized as someone who is very vocal about his life: "Though I am a man / who is loud / on the birth / of his ways," (lines 12-5). He is concerned about his relationship to the public and how others keep him from knowing himself. This person is at once set apart and intrinsically tied to the masses; it is this push-pull effect that keeps him from realizing his true self. The speaker also experiences an alienation from everything that was once in his heart—"the tree's shadow / winding around the chair" and "a distant music / of frozen birds rattling / in the cold,"—produce nothing but fear in him (lines 3-6). "The Liar" acts as a window into the emotionally wrought psychological landscape of this speaker as he re-examines the world around himself.
Although it is dangerous in poetry to assume that the speaker is the same as the poet of a poem, there is a case for believing that speaker in "The Liar" is Amiri Baraka himself. The poem concerns a very public transformation of self, a transformation that Baraka himself underwent just a few years after publishing this poem. Additionally, Baraka includes his own nickname, "Roi," in the final stanza, indicating that the speaker also shares a name with the author. When reading this poem, we can find it useful to see the speaker as being both a literal representation of Baraka and a distinct entity that is going through a similar transformation as he is. This way, we can make inferences about the overall themes and messages of the poem without placing too much pressure for literal understanding on the poem itself.
