 Suppose that the Russellian amendment works for fictional sentences on their non-conniving use. Intuitively, however, there are many sentences that talk of fictional characters even though they do not even implicitly mention stories. Let us call these external metafictional sentences (some other commentators talk of “transfictive” or “critical” sentences).  (4)  and  (5)  above are typical examples. Clearly, (4) and (5) cannot be taken as elliptical for internal metafictional sentences such as: