If someone were to ask us if the person whose death we imagined was really dead, we would reply no, that it was a totally private fantasy of our own. Whereas if someone asks us whether Werther really did kill himself, we reply yes, and the fantasy we are talking about here is not private, it is a real fact on which the entire community of readers agrees. So much so that anyone who killed himself just because he had imagined (being well aware that this was simply the product of his imagination) that his loved one was dead would be judjed by us to be mad, while somehow or other we try to justify someone killing himself because of Wether's suicide, knowing full well that the latter was a fictional character.

Umberto Eco, "On some functions of literature"