Discussions of the relationship between narrative fiction and human behavior frequently address distinctions between material readers and discursive characters. Many recent accounts of the relationship between reader and character, including work from Lisa Zunshine, Richard Walsh, and William Flesch, attend to how characters behave as models that do or do not inform the behavior of their readership. Both Candace Vogler’s “The Moral of the Story” and John Brenkman’s “On Voice,” though from different angles, explore the implications of using fictional bodies as model subjects or test cases. Both writers discuss specific elements of narrative fiction—Volger, characterlogical stasis; Brenkman, novel voice—which they suggest impact the historical and/or ethical relationship between narrated and material worlds. Though each characterizes this relationship differently, both interpretive models argue against direct, univocal communication between the elusive “real” and what Wolfgang Iser calls the “fictionalizing act, which converts the realities concerned into a sign for something other than themselves” (Iser, para 8). Vogler, for her part, positions the divide in terms of fictional narrative’s lack of fully realized psychological motivation: “[W]hether or not ‘moral thinking lives and breathes’ in novels,” she writes, “practical reason—reason in and toward action—does not” (35). Brenkman, aiming to bolster novel theory against the offenses of narratology, implies that the latter “installs a semblance of authorial consciousness” that is overly “sovereign and unified,” a semblance that has encouraged contemporary, narratology-influenced interpretation to “drif[t] […] into thematic even allegorical criticism (291, 281). 1 Nevertheless, though he does not view it as monological, Brenkman does suggest that “the voice of the novel emerges as the writer’s creation, putting his intentions and purposes openly at stake in the narration itself” (285). At issue in both these formulations is the interpreter’s capacity to isolate the characterological act—whether reference or comment, intention or invitation—from that of the authorial or textual. As it treats the specific conditions of fictional narrative, this paper argues for a plural methodol