Cause and Effect in Theme

Fiction writers often write with the goal of changing minds about the real world. To do this, they often write to convince us that x causes y in the actual world. To do this, they need to convince us that x causes y in the fictional world and that what is true in the fictional world can be exported to the actual world. To see this, I consider realistic works of fiction, Persuasion and The Bluest Eye, and several works of speculative fiction. I conclude by arguing that, in both sorts of fiction, writers and readers rely on what I call “counterfactual thinking,” which will be the subject of the next chapter.