Abstract

Some fictions deliberately omit all fictional statements about the mental functioning of fictional agents. This presents an interpretive dilemma, as when we read fiction we ought to reconstruct the fictional minds of characters significant to the plot. Fictions that present the reader with an opaque fictional mind resist the general imaginative project prescribed by fiction-making and seem to demand a novel approach to imagining their fictional entities. Such fictional entities demand the reader commit to one of at least two different ways of imagining nothing about a fictional mind, without explicitly authorizing either. One approach has already been described by H. Porter Abbott. Another can be extracted from Simone De Beauvoir, whose ethics of ambiguity is well suited to dealing with fictional entities about which nothing is fixed nor determined.