Chapter 5 shows that the theories discussed in Chapter 4 explain how fictional narratives work as metarepresentations expressed via interpretive use. Authors metarepresent narrative voices, including narrators and characters, and communicate attitudes towards them. Considering narratives in this way breaks down some of the categories in traditional and stylistic approaches, such as the distinction between reliable and unreliable narrators. In addition metarepresentation allows for multiple embeddings and attitudes. These claims are illustrated with readings of extracts from two first-person narratives – Room by Emma Donoghue and The Tenant of Wildfell Hallby Anne Brontë – and two third-person narratives – ‘Edward and Pia’ by Donald Barthelme and The God of Small Thingsby Arundhati Roy. The chapter attends to the detail of narratorial alignment with a character, free indirect style and the representation of mind style. These examples show the complexities of metarepresentational layering which is possible in fiction, as well as the shifting of narratorial attitudes. A reader negotiates these features in interpreting the narratives, and in this way reading fiction can be seen as exercising the capacity to understand other minds. The concepts of metarepresentation and interpretive use relate fiction to other communicative uses of language.