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cles) displaysalasfewer individuals than the illusory world of Oedipus's beliefs. But since in both fictional worlds individuals are characterized by different relational (S-necessary) properties, there is no possible identity between the merely homonymous individuals of the two worlds.
Oedipus Rex is the story of a tragic inaccessibility. Oedipus blinds himself because he was unable to see that he was living a world that was not accessible to and from the real one. In order to understand his tragedy, the Model Reader is supposed to reconstruct the fabula (the story, what really happened) as a temporally ordered course of events andat the same timeto outline the different worlds represented by the diagrams above.
The notion of possible world is useful for a theory of fiction because it helps to decide in which sense a fictional character cannot communicate with his or her counterparts in the actual world. Such a problem is not as whimsical as it seems. Oedipus cannot conceive of the world of Sophoclesotherwise he would have not married his mother. Fictional characters live in a handicapped world. When we really understand their fate, then we start to suspect that we too, as citizens of the actual world, frequently undergo our destiny just because we think of our world in the same way as the fictional characters think of their own. Fiction suggests that perhaps our view of the actual world is as imperfect as that of fictional characters. This is the way successful fictional characters become paramount examples of the "real" human condition.
5. Small Worlds
According to Dolezel * (1988:233ff), fictional worlds are incomplete and semantically unhomogeneous: they are handicapped and small worlds.
Insofar as it is handicapped, a fictional world is not a maximal and complete state of affairs. In the real world if "John lives in Paris" is true, it is also true that John lives in the capital of France, that he lives north of Milan and south of Stockholm, and that he lives in the city whose first bishop was Saint Denis. Such a series of requirements do not hold for doxastic worlds. If it is true that John believes that Tom lives in Paris, this does not mean that John believes that Tom lives north of Milan.
Fictional worlds are as incomplete as the doxastic ones. At the beginning of Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (see Delaney 1980), we read:

 
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