There is that saying that fiction, really good fiction (the kind we refer to as ‘literature’), is a ‘lie that tells the truth’. Not a truth, but the truth. Meaning, every utterance of such a work, if we are to accept the premise of the saying (or to momentarily grant it), is so suffused with the spirit of truth, in the abstract sense, that the very identity of the work as a fictive artifact is transfigured, and the work becomes greater than the sum of its parts, even if it never ceases to inhabit the generic tropes by which we recognize and describe it. Don Quixote is such a fiction.