This chapter presents the general frame of the discussion, i.e., the contraposition between J.M. Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello and Thomas Nagel on the limits and possibilities of imagination. Whereas Nagel—using the example of bat’s echolocation in his famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”—argues that human imagination is limited and incapable of grasping sensory experiences that are too distant from ours, in The Lives of Animals Costello embraces the opposite position and argues that there are no limits to the power of the imagination, adding a strong ethical overtone to her claim (that is absent from Nagel’s). The chapter presents Costello’s and Nagel’s positions and illustrates many of the criticisms that have been moved against both.