Construction of Virtuality and Reality From the Perspective of Possible-worlds Narrative TheoryTaking Don DeLillo’s Underworld as An Example

As an important branch of postclassical narratology, possible-worlds narrative theory confirms that the literary fictional worlds are autonomous and ontological, providing a reasonable formula for the explanation of metafiction in postmodern works. In the magnum opus Underworld, Don DeLillo employs a baseball as a thread, interweaving multiple possible worlds embedded in the textual actual world through two timelines, thus increasing the narrative depth and reading difficulty. Based on Marie-Laure Ryan’s possible-worlds narrative theory, the paper endeavors to construct a possible-worlds model to analyze how recursive structures embedded in the narrative world break the boundary between the virtual and the real through ontological metalepsis, and finally integrate into the textual actual world. In addition, the paper will explain how the readers help generate the plot in light of the observer effect in quantum mechanics, achieving accessibility among the three worlds of the author, the narrator, and the reader.