You may say that Ozymandias is dead – or rather fictional but, even in the fiction, dead – so couldn't apply to have his virtual trunkless legs buried in the unsearchable sand (I will retain control of this metaphor).
Or, rather, fictional life is often something like fictional life in other books: Nesbit's Victorian London seems little different from Tartt's contemporary Manhattan.
He had just filmed a scene set at a Hollywood charity benefit dinner for rape victims in which he, or rather the fictional he, becomes ostentatiously bored.
By making comic books based on celebrities, rather than fictional characters, Bluewater Productions has thrived in the face of a shrinking market.
Djuna and Thelma — or, rather, their fictional stand-ins, Nora and Robin — take a walk through the louche neighborhoods of Paris and encounter a woman begging for money to buy a drink.
As the 1970s Labour government staggers from crisis to crisis, Graham shows whips and lobby-fodder – portrayed as actual rather than fictional characters – as playthings of chance, not masters of their fate.
While dramatic productions frequently conform to a written text, it is not the use of such a text but rather the fictional mimetic (from Greek mimēsis, "imitation," "representation") nature of the performer's behaviour that makes a work dramatic.
So when Hensher dismisses the Christian beliefs of a nurse he meets, I'm left questioning whether his exploration of Saint Perpetua's faith isn't incomprehensible after all, but rather the fictional expression of his own feelings about Christianity.
"The Hour" is a six-part miniseries from the BBC about the BBC — or rather, a fictional BBC news show, set against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis, the Cold War, and a fairly enjoyable love triangle among the show's staff.
The character of Wittgenstein, with his prickly sensitivity and his eccentric passion for cinema, seems to have been summoned not from the spiritual ether but from "The World as I Found It," Bruce Duffy's rather Doctorovian fictional treatment of the early-20th-century Cambridge philosophy scene.
If you have avoided the reviews and front page (front page!) news coverage of the death of a character in this book – who, let me reiterate, is (or rather "was") fictional – I shall sum up the objections, which fall into two categories: "I literally was Bridget Jones but this character isn't like me now and that is an outrage" and, "I always hated Bridget Jones because she is anti-feminist".
