Topics Literature

Question When we read stories in a book or watch popular TV shows do the characters, not actors, actually come to life? Do they actually believe they are real, or are they in sense real? If someone was to create a sitcom, say Friends, would the character Russ actually live the life of Russ and walk around in the created "universe" of Friends? How don't I know that my life only exists in and was created by the mind of another? I've often pondered this thought since I was a kid. I once watched a show (the title is unfamiliar) where the "real life" characters jumped into a comic book and interacted with the characters in the comic. It was as if the comic had created a seperate "universe". As you can tell I'm not as educated as you philosophers, but I am still young yet. It's also probably quite apparent that I've never had any philosophical education either. My whole life I've been asking questions and have only recenty started to gain answers. Any answers or speculations you offer would be greatly appreciated. Jon

Accepted:
March 23, 2006

Comments

When you consider that characters in stories are so much like us, it can be disconcerting: if they're like us, then we're like them, too. Indeed, what distinguishes us? Just that they're in stories and we're in reality? But couldn't they say the same about us?

That's a very tempting line of thought, but we should resist it.

There is a big difference between something's being represented as being so, and its being so. I can say that I have fixed the car, but that doesn't make it true that I've fixed the car. Someone might counter, yes it does--it makes it true according to you. But being true according to me is not a way of being true any more than being not true is a way of being true. This can be a little hard to see because of a very natural way we have of describing what someone has said. Often, instead of saying "Crimmins says that the car is fixed", we say, "The car is fixed, according to Crimmins". That makes it sound like the car is fixed, though not in reality but only in the according-to-Crimmins reality. But really it's just a picturesque way of saying the same thing, namely, that I have said something that represents the car as having been fixed.

The same is true in our talk about fictions. Instead of saying, "Conan Doyle, in the Holmes stories, represented that there was a detective named 'Holmes' who was very smart," we say "Holmes was a very smart detective, in Conan Doyle's Holmes stories," or even just "Holmes was a very smart detective". That makes it sound like there really was this detective, just not in reality. But, again, that's a mistake that arises from a picturesque style of describing what is represented (in this case, in fiction) as being so.

A feature of fictional characters that is puzzling if you think they are "real but not in reality" is called fictional incompleteness: did Holmes ever have a bunion on his left big toe? It's not just that we don't know---there's no fact of the matter, because all the "facts about Holmes" are settled by the stories, and it's unsettled there. This is no mystery at all if we realize that the only genuine facts are that the stories represent various things as being the case (but quite a mystery if Holmes is as real as we are).