Fiction and non-fiction

Beatrice and Virgil explores the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. On page six, Henry says, ‘fiction and non-fiction are very rarely published in the same book …Tradition holds that the two must be kept apart. That is how our knowledge and impressions of life are sorted in bookstores and libraries – separate aisles, separate floors – and that is how publishers prepare their books, imagination in one package, reason in another. It’s not how writers write.’ Why do we rely on this separation? In what ways does Beatrice and Virgil bridge or reinforce this divide?