It's not that the question is unanswerable, but that there are competing conceptions of what fiction is. For some writers, what's in the book is all there is. T

It's not that the question is unanswerable, but that there are competing conceptions of what fiction is. For some writers, what's in the book is all there is. The characters don't have a life outside of the book. Nothing happens to them after the narrative or before it or outside of it. There is no world beyond what they create. If a detail isn't included in the text, then it doesn't exist. Asking a question like "what mac?" is a sort of category error. It's like asking Edvard Munch what the man depicted in The Scream had for breakfast.