A novel’s readers and characters can be fused into one imagined community.

Evidence

Extensive comment is surely unnecessary. It should suffice to note that right from the start the image (wholly new to Filipino writing) of a dinner-party being discussed by hundreds of unnamed people, who do not know each other, in quite different parts of Manila, in a particular month of a particular decade, immediately conjures up the imagined community. And in the phrase ‘a house on Anloague Street’ which ‘we shall describe in such a way that it may still be recognized,’ the would-be recognizers are we-Filipino-readers. The casual progression of this house from the ‘interior’ time of the novel to the ‘exterior’ time of the [Manila] reader’s everyday life gives a hypnotic confirmation of the solidity of a single community, embracing characters, author and readers, moving onward through calendrical time. Notice too the tone. While Rizal has not the faintest idea of his readers’ individual identities, he writes to them with an ironical intimacy, as though their relationships with each other are not in the smallest degree problematic. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 95

Categorization

• XREF: Overlaps with the scaffolding goal — the imagined community is precisely the mechanism Islamophobia readings later apply to how colonized groups reimagine themselves. — connects to: Novels and newspapers supplied the technical means to imagine the nation — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 87; A universal imagined community was reproduced through countless particular local forms — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 82; Novelistic simultaneity links strangers through shared clocked time and the reader’s omniscient view. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 89 (+3 more)
• SHARE: The ‘ironical intimacy’ toward readers whose individual identities are unknown is a striking detail worth sharing with someone working on Filipino or Southeast Asian literature.

Related

• Novelistic simultaneity links strangers through shared clocked time and the reader’s omniscient view. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Shared journeys among strangers create the sense of an imagined community #expands (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 223