Constraints on Fictions: With an Analysis of M.K. Joseph's "A Soldier's Tale"

Abstract

In this paper we examine some consequences of a truth conditional possible worlds account of the semantics of fiction following Lewis (1978). We show that several characteristics of story telling follow from Lewis's account, including the basic time relationship obtaining between the time the story is told and the story itself, which we call the terminal constraint; the locality convention, which states that a narrator whose location in space and time is known must indicate a change in location; a non-involvement convention, which states that no hearer of a fiction can play a part in the story except as co-narrator. In a principled way, we can also distinguish different kinds of narrators and authors. We show that no narrator and only one kind of author can be literally omniscient. We then examine three notions of truth used to describe fiction other than that used by Lewis and logicians: truth of correspondence, truth of coherence and ultimate truth or meaning of a fiction. We show that these can be explicated within Lewis's framework and we demonstrate that there is a set of fictions which do not easily fall into Lewis's framework, i.e. fictions where a narrator tells us that the world in which he is telling the story is not necessarily the world in which he knows all his statements to be fact. We conclude with an examination of a fiction whose complex narrative technique allows us to illustrate some of the deductions we have made about narratives.