Credibility and realism in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko In the Dictionary of Literary Terms, Harry Shaw states: "In effective narrative literature, fictional people , through characterization, become so believable that they exist for the reader as real people." (1) Looking at Moll Flanders (2) by Daniel Defoe and Oroonoko (3) by Aphra Behn, the reader will find it difficult to make this definition conform to Moll and Behn's narrator. This does not mean that Defoe and Behn's work is “ineffective”, but there is in fact a difficulty: it is the claim to truth. Defoe in his preface states: "The author is supposed to be writing his own story." (Moll Flanders, p. 1) and Behn states: "I myself was an eyewitness to much of what you will find written here, and what I could not witness, I received from the mouth of the principal actor in this story , the hero himself, (...)" (Oroonoko, 75) Although both authors claim that their stories are true, and therefore that their characters are realistic, there seems to be a gap between the authors' claims and the " reality" of the characterization. This question is closely connected with the fact that both novels belong to the early English novels. There was no fixed tradition in which the authors worked; instead the novel was in the definition phase. The question arises whether the two works lack a certain roundness in their narrators. The main characteristic of the new literary form of the novel according to Ian Watt is "truth over individual experience" (4) and its new form is created by a focus on the individual character. It is presented in a specific definition of time and space. The second section of this article will show the extent to which this is accomplished in both novels. In the third section I intend to analyze the individualism of the characters in relation to the claim to truth and their complexity in description.2 RealismWatt argues that the characters of a novel owe their individuality to realistic presentation. "Realism" is expressed through the rejection of traditional plots, particularity, emphasis on the personality of the character, awareness of the duration of time and space and its expression in style. 2.1 Rejection of traditional plots Watt states that "earlier literary forms had reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practices the principal test of truth: .