Yes, of course

I can help you a lot, but could you explain to me what you specifically understand of a "truth box" so I can answer you accurately? Because our concepts differ due to the chaos of the term.

Narrative and truth is a humanistic dilemma; just take the many myths of folks and peoples. Some narratives have become an essential part of holy books; once believed (but maybe not happened), they emerge as created reality. And: archeological findings (or non-findings) cannot shake the narrative, once in wider circulation. However, I do not exclude that a narrative can lead us to the truth, in terms of generic learning. And: also fiction can become reality: in my childhood, I read a book about the whole world wearing masks, because of a bad medical condition in the air. It seems all to depend on the narrative (of truth or lie) and the temporal event. There seems to be nothing random in the universe as perfect accounting system and dynamic narrative.

Narrative and truth aren't incompatible. Some historians write in what historiographers regard as a narrative style or as narrative history. But some works of fiction also incorporate bits of historical narrative in a copy-and-paste manner. John Dos Passos does this to some extent in his USA trilogy. And some fictional narratives are certainly true-to-life if not literally true. Some of John Le Carré's novels, for example, are highly illuminating as regards the nature of bureaucratic or administrative intrigues,

"Aristotle is inclined to think that through art such things arise, the form of which is in the artist's soul. A beautiful form does not exist "by itself", it is the result of the artist's own productive ability. Emphasizing the obvious uniqueness of artistic reality in comparison with the real world, Aristotle raises the problem of the relationship between truth and plausibility in art. Plausibility arises as a result of skilful copying of reality, of everything that exists outside of art. Truth in art is something else, beyond credibility; in fact, it personifies a special artistic meaning, the expression of which the artist's efforts are directed at."

The moral depth of the novel must be closely related to its verbal richness, and no novel should be characterized simply by its narrative material. Rather, it must be distinguished by its technical peculiarities that make it a different narrative form in terms of characters, events, plot, time and its context of the event, the development of characters, the succession of events, and their connection to each other as loops linked closely And, we may find that some novels have worked on aspects, and since their inception, on the novelist's ego, and through its ego, it proceeded to the other nucleus or other techniques.

Ahmed Abdelrazak I'm sorry to say that there is some ambiguity about the question. Or it might be intentional. Any way, there cannot be a unanimous agreement on what is exactly meant by "truth". In this respect, for instance, I could recall Michel Foucault's famous words: "Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.  And it induces regular effects of power.  Each society has its regime of truth". For me, this is suffice to claim that in fiction, truth cannot be put in one box.

Good question

Michael Uebel I agree. Dos Passos did not engage in trivial "copy-and-paste". But many scholars do allege there is copy-and-paste. For example, Matt Hanson, in The New Yorker (December 29, 2019) says,

"In the “Newsreel” sections, text from actual newsreels flows together with snippets from newspaper articles, lines from popular songs, and excerpts from radio broadcasts."

But he also attests to their non-triviality:

"These bursts of information seem random but were carefully selected for maximum effect. Hurtling themselves at the reader, they are too brief to be fully explicable, but too portentous to be ignored...."

A story is neither completely real nor imaginary

Of course! it is possible to study the "box of truth" within the narrated in fiction, understood in the broad sense.

The narrating interior of the soul, the narrating voice that derives from it, the narrating "self" that precedes the inner flow of the soul together with the elements of the narrating body in a broad sense, "the flow of consciousness" of what is true or not according to our true values. Everything comes out even more in the "Trilogies", where the same fears of the outcome condition the narrator in the first delivery, the narrator himself becomes aware of making himself credible in the eyes of those who can bring him advantages in accepting or not his storytelling. While, for the second and third delivery, these awarenesses partially vanish, opening the way to additional elements that detach themselves from the initial soul to go in search of something new. I take as an example the "Baztan Trilogy" [2013-14] by Dolores Redondo Meira, where a narrating "corpus" derives from the initial real, irremediably compromised with the author's own spirit.

Cfr. DOI: 10.24197 / sxxi.14.2016.69-81

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Any narrative, no matter how much fiction it may have, IS ALWAYS BASED ON REALITY, more or less marinated by the creativity of its author ... THEN, YES, OF COURSE !; it is always the author's own experience and experiences that inspire fiction, but it does not come out of nowhere ("nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu": Nothing exists in the mind that was not previously in the senses, asserted the classics and experimentally corroborated the brilliant neurologist and Nobel laureate Lord Charles Sherrington); on the other hand, IT IS ART -OR FICTION IN OUR CASE- WHICH IMITATES REALITY AND NOT THE REVERSE; but, even more, in the end all fiction arises from the self and speaks of the self, as any psychoanalyst would corroborate.