This document outlines four modes of fiction: low-mimetic, high-mimetic, didactic, and impressionist. Low-mimetic fiction features restrained realism that prevents identifying with protagonists. High-mimetic fiction dramatizes meaning through language. Didactic fiction deliberately distances readers from characters to convey moral or satirical commentary. Impressionist fiction attempts realism by imitating characters' consciousness through stylized attention flickers.

1. Four Modes of Fiction

2. Low-Mimetic
• Some novels signal to us in such a
way as to create the anticipation of
comedy.
• They have a kind of realism that is
restrained or angled so as to
preclude our identifying with the
central character; the protagonist.

3. • This entails the notation of character
and events in manner explicit enough to
render them recognizable.
• It does not entail photographic
naturalism.
• Term presented by Northrop Frye.

4. • Frye used this term as a way of
describing protagonist who fail to
rise above their environment .

5. High-mimetic
• Identified with tragedy, where the
language acts out the meaning in a
highly dramatic way.
• In prose, it is what F.R. Leavis called
“The Novel as Dramatic Poem”.
• One need not altogether empathize
with the protagonist.

6. Didactic mode
• We may be conscious of the distance
deliberately imposed between us
and the characters.
• They are held up for our amused
contemplation, often to the
accompaniment of a good deal of
authorial comment.

7. • The author himself is a palpable
presence, a stage-manager or
puppet-master, quite explicitly
telling us what to think.
• This mode is sometimes ironic,
sometimes moralistic.

8. • We are aware of a split level of
narration: the author separate the
polish characters point of view from
his own informed one in order to
satirize what he considers to be
ridiculous behaviour or to point a
moral

9. Impressionist
• Particularly wide spread among
serious authors in the twentieth
century attempts realism through
imitating the consciousness of
particular characters.

10. • It predecessors in the eighteenth
century: when a character in
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
becomes unconscious, the page goes
back!

11. • One cannot without many
qualifications, term them realistic,
for the flicker of attention is
necessarily stylized when given a
degree of permanence if fictional
form.