ABSTRACT
Most fictions speak of real places and times (like nineteenth-century London in many novels by Dickens), and often of real people as well (like Napoleon in War and Peace). Most fictions also contain purely fictional characters, ones which are entirely “made up” like Kilgore Trout; some fictions similarly contain purely fictional places, like the planet Tralfamadore, or purely fictional weapons, clothing, and beasts. How should we think about these made-up people, places, and things? Should we think of them all in the same way? Should we include ideal gases and spatial points of zero size in a homogeneous category with Kilgore and Tralfamadore? Fictional objects don’t occupy space in our world, so we can never encounter them or visit them. Should we say that they are things that don’t exist? Or that they are merely possible things? Or that they are existent but abstract (and so non-space-occupying) things? Or should we simply deny that there are
any such things? The first three options, according to which there really are fictional characters but they are nonexistent, or merely possible, or abstract, correspond to three ways to be a realist about fictional characters; the fourth option (there are no such things) I count as irrealism on this question. The realisms are so called because they say that there really are such things as fictional objects and they belong to our reality, though the objects are “exotic”: they are nonexistent, or nonactual or nonconcrete, unlike ordinary objects, tables and mountains, which exist, are actual, and are concrete. The exotic nature of a realist’s objects is demanded by the agreed datum that we can never literally encounter purely fictional characters or places, not in the way we could encounter George W. Bush or Timbuktu; as Peter Strawson said, you can’t spill your coffee on them. Realist approaches are considered in the three chapters that follow this. These are followed by a chapter describing and arguing for a form of irrealism. The present chapter aims to get clearer about the nature of the debate between realists and irrealists about fiction.
