Here I extend to a reading of two Non-Western narratives (the Chinese Story of the Stone and Japanese Tale of Genii) and one European narrative (Don Quixote) Blumenberg’s analysis of the modern (Renaissance) concept of “reality”--- reality becomes redefined as “actualization of a context in itself.” an infinite, dynamic, future-oriented process which is grounded in human intersubjectivity--and correlative description of the modern novel, which now must reflect upon its own possibility and so “represents nothing but itself.” In all three works we find a new focus on “fictionality” and on the autonomy and free possibihties of human creativity; the question of the Corre­sponding roles of fact and fiction becomes a central narrative as well as epistemological issue in all three litarary traditions, as does the problematic of the ever-increasing gap between individual and collective (intersubjective) experience.