A lot of people approve of Kendall Walton’s idea that what is fictional in a story (what some of us call true in a story) is closely related to what we are to imagine when being told the story. There’s obviously details to be filled in, but my impression is that many people think that this is at least roughly on the right track.

I did too, until relatively recently. I now think there’s a pretty major difference between what a story makes fictional and what we are to imagine when consuming the story.

What is fictional in a story is holistic – it is determined by what is said throughout the entire story. We may be told something on page 400 that implies that the narrator on page 40 was unreliable.

What we are to imagine when reading a story is atomistic – what we should imagine when reading page 40 is largely a function of what’s on page 40, and perhaps the preceeding pages. It isn’t a function of what’s on page 400.

My impression, and this could be wrong, is that this is too big a difference to be bridged. It’s just too hard to find a holistic criteria for proper imagining. But without one there can’t be a constitutive link between what is to be imagined and what is fictional in the story.

One thought might be that what is fictional in the story is what you are to imagine after reading the story. But this seems to get the experience of fiction all wrong. At the end of the story you aren’t supposed to be reflecting back on the comic relief scenes. (Imagine the audience member still laughing at the end of Hamlet, “He played xylophone on the skulls! That’s hilarious!!”) And even on second reading, one isn’t properly appreciating the story if one doesn’t imagine what the unreliable narrator says, as she is saying it.

Remember in modern fiction it doesn’t have to be made clear who the narrator is, or even whether there is a narrator within the story, until well after the relevant sections of the story have passed. In such a story it doesn’t seem right that the right way to read the story is with the knowledge of who narrates what. But the equation of what is fictional with what is to be imagined seems, I think, to require that.