Real Authors and Fictional Agents (Fictional Narrators, Fictional Authors)

A suitable account of fiction must involve a conceptual distinction between (at least) the following figures, or roles: real authors, fictional narrators, fictional authors. Real authors are the real original utterers of fiction-involving sentences in their fictional use, the one mobilizing pretense. They may coincide (although this would be rare) either with fictional narrators or with fictional authors. A fictional narrator is the protagonist of a tale that is narrated in the first person: the internal point of view on the tale. A fictional author constitutes the tale’s external point of view that vividly manifests itself when the tale is narrated by no protagonist. Fictional narrators, however, never coincide with fictional authors. For either one or the other is the fictional agent, the one-place factor of a narrow fictional context of interpretation whose contribution is to provide a fictional truth-conditional content to the fiction-involving sentences of the relevant tale.