It is possible, then, to beleive that there is a significant narrative embedded in reality, even though it has no superhuman source. The novelist George Eliot, for example, was not a religious believer; but a novel like Middlemarch, like many a realist work of literature, assumes that there is a meaningful design inherent in history itself. The task of the classical realist writer is less to invent a fable than to flesh out the hidden logic of a story which is immanent in reality. Contrast this, then, with a modernist author like Joyce, for whom a pattern has to be projected into the universe rather than excavated from it. Joyce's novel Ulysses is intricately organized all the way through by the Greek myth referred to in its title; but part of the joke is that any other myth would probably have served just as well to smuggle a semblance of order into a contingent, chaotic world.
-Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, "The Problem of Meaning," 76.