“Invented dilemmas—that’s essentially what fiction is—can feel strangely meaningful precisely because someone is being put through paces which are not our own, and which have no reason to be. Having no reason to be, these invented dilemmas must justify, aesthetically, their own invention, which then puts those fictional paces through a further set of ethical paces. When we readers ask, as we invariably do, the important aesthetic-ethical questions—“What’s morally at stake here? Does this novel earn its existence? Do I believe in it aesthetically, do I grant its right to exist?”—we are putting fiction through its own paces. In this sense, fiction is a hypothesis that is always testing itself.” (James Wood, How Fiction Works)
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