When we engage with fictions, we are, in effect, pretending to deal with reports of actual events. After all, numerous fictional works are explicitly designed to facilitate this kind of pretense. This was the prevailing understanding of fiction in both analytic philosophy and classical narratology for decades.
This issue can be referred to as the problem of unreportability. The standard solution to this challenge has been to argue that fictions are not pretend reports, but rather direct authorial stipulations to imagine specific scenarios. This paper contends, however, that such an explanation fails to provide a satisfactory account of fiction. On the one hand, we are aware that we are dealing with a story invented by Mary Shelley.
However, it seems that we also pretend that we are reading an account of actual events. Indeed, many fictional works are explicitly formatted as accounts of real events, such as journals as in Robinson Crusoe or autobiographies like Moll Flanders. The FRT seems convincing when applied to first-person narratives the situations in which authors create fictional characters who report the events from the storyworld, like Huck Finn in Twain's novel.
This is the case with novels like Pride and Prejudice or Anna Karenina which disclose the inner thoughts of characters without any clear-cut fictional reporter. They are also best understood as fictional reports. When we read Anna Karenina , we do not experience this novel as inviting a radically different imaginative attitude than, for example, Jane Eyre a fiction framed as a first-person report. In other words, we do not read Jane Eyre as if it were a report of true events but then treat Anna Karenina as a mere authorial invention.
Our reactions seem similar in both cases. However, the proponent of FRT could simply brush off this concern by pointing out the fact that what is true in fiction often bends the rules of reality. If there are successful fictions portraying time travel or talking animals, then one could very well assume the fictional existence of some exceptionally insightful reporters.
