Within the reading of Telling the Truth, specifically The Gospel as Tragedy, Buechner draws from a scene from a novel to show us an example of the truth of silence. The scene is described by a senior English teacher who's been teaching them the play. He starts off saying that the class had went better than usual, illustrating the classroom environment with the gym class active outside as well as the significant (if not all) students in the room. Doing as a teacher is expected, he asks "What evidence do you find in Act Three for a significant change in Lear's character?"
He receives an answer from an unexpected student, "He's gotten kinder." The teacher pries further, a few others chiming in on the ways Lear's been treating others better. But it is not until a certain Laura Fleischman speaks up, claiming that Lear says a prayer for the people. Laura is asked to read the passage aloud, and she does. The passage describes poor and naked wretches who are in the storm without roofs over their heads. Lear asks them how they'd defend themselves from seasons like that. She finishes with the words "'Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,'"
The teacher asks who the wretches that Lear prays for are. Another student answers "We are," meaning to be funny, but no one laughed. They all understood the underlying truth of the statements. It was in the silence that the students realized that they were the ones biding the pelting of the pitiless storm, that they were homeless and unfed. They realized that they were to expose themselves to feel as they do and they felt the truth within the story resonate with their lives. The storytelling and description here clearly illustrates the moment of silence after Greg Dixon inadvertently allows the truth as well as the Gospel to be told through his attempt to be funny. It plays in tandem with comedy, another plane that Telling the Truth illuminates. While this may simply be a good story, the truth can easily resonate within us as well.
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