How do we regard fictional people? How do they regard us?
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Abstract
Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They
believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of
fiction about whether real individuals exist in the story’s world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of
Jane Eyre, even though Victoria is not mentioned in it? The experiments we report here find that when
participants are prompted to consider the world of a fictional individual (“Consider the world of Jane
Eyre…”), they are willing to say that a real individual (e.g., Queen Victoria) can exist in the same world.
But when participants are prompted to consider the world of a real individual, they are less willing to say
that a fictional individual can exist in that world. The asymmetry occurs when we ask participants both if
a real person is in the character’s world and if the person would appear there. However, the effect is
subject to spatial and temporal constraints. When the person and the character share spatial and temporal
settings, interchange is more likely to occur. These results shed light on the author’s implicit contract with
the reader, which can license the reader to augment a fictional world with features that the author only
implicates as part of the work’s background