  Narrative, according to Carroll, is something akin to guided  imagination, a process he describes as entertaining thoughts or  holding propositions non-assertively (Carroll 1990). People can work  themselves into a variety of emotional states by merely imagining  situations that they know are untrue, such as being passed over for a promotion, cheated on by one’s spouse, or having one’s child  kidnapped. The thought theory of emotional response is the  theory that fiction taps this power of the imagination for its energy to produce emotional reactions. This seems to solve the paradox of  suspense, since we can know that the hero will not die, but still  fear the outcome simply by imagining that he might. On this view,  suspense does not require genuine uncertainty, only entertained  uncertainty. Although we cannot be genuinely uncertain about the  outcome of a familiar narrative, we can willfully entertain  uncertainty. And we can entertain uncertainty on any number of  encounters with the same story. 