We imagined there would be a slow burn of realization and a thrill at the peeling away of the layers, as the fictiveness slowly emerged."

Ironically, Ms. Byatt's post-modern self-consciousness about the fictiveness of fiction often takes the old-fashoned moralizing form.

The fictiveness of the concept can be deduced from the very meaning of the term, which connotes simplicity, basicness, the zero-degree of cultivation, mankind in its so-called natural state.

The multilayered fictiveness of Cullin's Holmes (a character in a novel about the "real life" of a famous fictional character who often worked in disguise) suggests that his identity - and by extension, identity itself - is a thing wrought collaboratively, by many hands, over time.