Narrative

1. Narrative and fiction

On one view, narratives are identifiable as fictional by their use of distinctively fictional language. But while devices like free indirect discourse (for example, ‘She was damned if she would go’) may be peculiar to fiction, there are fictions which do not employ them and which are linguistically indistinguishable from nonfiction. Nor can fictionality be explained in terms of lack of reference or truth, since fictions often concern real people and events, while much nonfiction is false. An alternative view is that fictional narratives function in a certain way. On one version of this theory, the reader is intended to imagine the occurrence of the events described in the narrative, rather than to treat those descriptions as assertions judgeable by standards of evidence and truth. This suggestion will be employed in the next section.