Realism and Credibility in Moll Flanders and Oroonoko In the Dictionary of Literary Terms, Harry Shaw states, "In effective narrative literature, fictional persons, through characterization, become so credible that they exist for the reader as real people." Looking at Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko the reader will find it difficult to make this definition conform to Moll and Behn's narrator. This doesn't mean that Defoe's and Behn's work is 'ineffective', but there is indeed a difficulty: it is the claim of truth. Defoe in his preface states, "The Author is here suppos'd to be writing her own History." (Defoe, 1) and