Newsletter: January 2026

I received an invitation to speak at Boğaziçi University near the end of the summer and I decided to use the occasion to develop a thought I’d been struck by a while back but never really worked through. The thought was this: it seems like, in some cases when an author mishandles a fictional character, we can complain that the author has failed to do justice to the character or let them down.

On its surface, there’s something odd about the complaint: how can anyone wrong a fictional character? After all, they don’t exist. And yet the complaint, at least in some cases, has a moral tenor. It’s not just that we think the work is aesthetically flawed on account of the author’s mishandling. We react as if someone has been done wrong.

I was first struck by my own reaction a number of years ago when I was coming to the conclusion of War and Peace. In this notoriously long novel, Tolstoy creates a rich and complex world that you can lose yourself in, and populates it with vivid characters. Princess Maria Bolkonskaya is a secondary character notable for her religious piety and devotion to others. In the epilogue, Tolstoy has her marry Count Nikolai Rostov. The marriage conveniently ties up a number of loose ends, but in a way that made me feel like Tolstoy had betrayed the character of Maria. This was an ending that suited Tolstoy’s narrative purposes but it didn’t fit with the Maria I’d come to know in the novel.

The problem here isn’t that something bad happened to Maria. Quite the contrary. Things go much worse for Maria’s brother Andrei, who dies of battle wounds (plus a spiritual awakening—it’s complicated), but I didn’t feel indignant about Tolstoy’s handling of Andrei. How well or badly an author treats a character in the sense that interests me is independent of how well or badly things go for that character in the world of the story.

You can probably think of your own examples. I offered two others in the talk: Charles Dickens killing off Dora in David Copperfield in order to advance the story of the main character and the representation of Luke Skywalker as a grumpy hermit in The Last Jedi, which travestied the character that had been central to the original Star Wars trilogy. A famous recent case is the final season of Game of Thrones. Many viewers were outraged at the writers’ handling of the characters. But I didn’t watch Game of Thrones so I can’t comment.

I find these cases interesting because they bring out some curious features of the ontology of fictional characters. That is, thinking about these cases help us reflect on the peculiar entities that fictional characters are.

In some sense, they’re flesh-and-blood people like you and me. Maria and Dora and Luke and the others have dreams and desires, loves and hates, they feel pain and joy, they’re born and they die. Our ability to care about them and to empathize with them depends on this recognition that they’re people of a kind.

But they’re also fictional people. In effect, there are two different kinds of things we can say to describe them. On one hand, they’re fictional people. That means there are statements that are true of them that could be true of real people. Maria is a princess, she’s devoutly religious, she’s the sister of Andrei, she marries Nikolai, and so on.

But on the other hand, characters like Maria are fictional people. That means there are statements that apply to them but not to real people. Maria is a fictional character, she’s a creation of Leo Tolstoy, she appears in War and Peace, and so on.

One of the puzzles concerning this dual status is how we assign truth-values to statements of the former kind. In some sense, it’s true to say that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. After all, he lived there and not in Paris. But in another sense, it’s false: no one by that name ever lived at that address (and the address itself was a fiction until someone recognized the tourism potential).

We have these two different kinds of statements because fictional characters exist (in some sense) in two different worlds. In the fictional world, they’re real live people who have families and home addresses. In the real world, they’re fictional people who are created by authors and exist only in stories.

Explaining the indignant reaction we sometimes have to authors’ treatment of their characters requires a third kind of statement, one that’s neither simply about the fictional world (“Maria is a princess”) nor simply about the real world (“Maria is a fictional character”). These are statements about the character’s role in the plot. Among other things, Maria is a lynchpin who brings all the major characters’ arcs together at the end of the story. By marrying Nikolai, she provides a family for Andrei’s orphaned son, and one that keeps them close to Nikolai’s sister Natasha and her husband, Pierre Bezukhov.

Consider that statement, “Maria is a lynchpin who brings all the major characters’ arcs together at the end of the story.” That’s not something that’s true of the fictional world in the way that “Maria is a princess” is true of the fictional world. You have to have a perspective from outside of that world in order to see it as structured by a plot. But it’s also not something that’s true of the real world in the way that “Maria is a fictional character” is true of the real world. It might be more accurate to say that it’s true of the story as the story exists in the real world.

This third kind of statement—a statement about the character’s role in the plot—is important for two reasons. First, it can connect real people like Leo Tolstoy to fictional people like Maria Bolkonskaya. It’s a statement about her world and the people who exist in it, but it’s also a statement about how Tolstoy went about shaping and plotting that world. And because it involves both Tolstoy and Maria, it can help us to understand how a real person like Tolstoy might have some sort of duty to a fictional character like Maria.

Second, it reveals an abiding tension in many kinds of storytelling. For War and Peace to work, I have to care about Maria and the other characters as people whose lives extend beyond the confines of the story. Tolstoy never tells us whether Maria is right-handed or left-handed, or what she dreamed about as a child, or how long she lives after the novel ends. But the novel encourages me to imagine her as someone about whom all these things are matters of settled fact. In effect, I have to suppose that the character of Maria has a certain degree of autonomy from the story I’m reading.

But also, for the story to work, it requires a plot with an internal logic where the characters and their actions fit into patterns that generate meaning. A story isn’t just a bunch of characters saying and doing a bunch of things. A story involves characters saying and doing things in a way that’s tightly organized by the author. And therein lies the tension: the story’s need for an organized plot can sometimes rub up against the characters’ autonomy from that story.

I found Tolstoy’s mishandling of Maria objectionable because he compromised the integrity and autonomy of the character to serve the purposes of his plot. Immanuel Kant famously argues that we should never treat others solely as a means to our ends but always respect them as ends in themselves. My indignation with Tolstoy involved a fictional analogue: I was upset that he treated this character as a means to the end of his plot in a way that undermined her integrity as an end in herself.

Are fictional characters the kinds of beings toward whom one can have moral obligations? I do think there’s a special way in which authors can betray their characters that’s different from the way they can misuse inanimate objects. In the original Star Wars films, the functioning or non-functioning of the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive is a flagrant plot device, but I don’t feel the filmmakers have wronged the Millennium Falcon in using it in this way. But I do feel they wronged the character of Luke Skywalker by subjecting him to the purposes of the plot of The Last Jedi.

This reaction is one piece of evidence for the peculiar status of fictional characters. They’re real in some sense, and in some other sense they’re not. We imagine them as living in a fully realized world while also recognizing that this world is conjured up by an author for the purposes of a story’s plot. Most important, we can care a great deal about fictional characters and find meaning in fictional stories. Fictions, and the characters that populate them, matter to us a great deal. So puzzling over what they are and how they work seems like a worthwhile undertaking. 

1. Tom Stoppard (RIP) was a ghost writer on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He’s ultimately responsible for most of the dialogue and for creating the character of Indy’s father, played by Sean Connery. (source)
2. Two hundred and fifty years before Trump, Benjamin Franklin was an eager advocate for the United States annexing Canada. (source)
3. Back in the days when telephone networks required switchboard operators, those switchboard operators were typically women. But it didn’t start out that way. Originally, Bell Labs hired teenage boys to run their switchboards. They switched to hiring grown women instead when they discovered that teenage boys were prone to making rude comments to customers and creating mischief by crossing lines so that strangers were put on the line with one another. (source)
4. Five fun facts from Merlin Sheldrake’s charming book on fungi, An Entangled Life. First, flatworms are remarkably good at regenerating severed body parts. Recent (somewhat sadistic) experiments revealed that, if you chop off a flatworm’s head, not only will it regrow its head and brain, but it will retain memories from before it was decapitated. Second, Beatrix Potter of Peter Rabbit fame was also an accomplished mycologist who made significant contributions to our understanding of fungi. Third, lichens cover about 8% of the world’s surface, more than tropical rainforests. Fourth, mycorrhizal hyphae are the filaments of fungus that link up symbiotically with the roots of plants. If the hyphae in the top 10cm of the Earth’s soil were stretched out in a single line, they would extend half the width of our galaxy. Fifth, a teaspoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms than the number of humans who have ever lived. (source)
5. The flag of Denmark, dating from 1625, is the oldest continuously used national flag. (source)
6. During the Second World War, the United States minted their five cent nickels using silver rather than nickel because nickel, which was an essential component in the manufacture of many military products, had become more precious than silver. (source)
7. Another great annual list of 52 from the guy who inspired my own monthly list. Here are five. Woodwork is older than humans (12). Unsurprisingly, attractive servers get better tips than unattractive ones, but more surprisingly, this is mostly due to women giving bigger tips to attractive women (21). More than half the farmed animals in the world are shrimp (28). In 2023, a million more people were born in Nigeria than in all of Europe (31). And global suicide rates have declined by 29% since 2000 (46). (source)
8. Russia’s casualties in the war in Ukraine are now estimated to exceed the United States’s casualties in the Second World War. (source)
9. In a poll asking Americans which was their favourite sport, soccer came third, behind (American) football and basketball but ahead of baseball. (source)
10. During the Second World War, the British war effort was assisted by a National Pigeon Service that mustered 200,000 birds. (source)