Reality bites for a lot of people. But the definition of reality is not concrete. After all, some people choose to live in their own realities--they are called fantasies--and many have realities imposed upon them. Therefore, what defines reality is not the truth of what exists, but personal experience, even in the unreality of a utopia. In The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia and The Truman Show, Samuel Johnson and writer Andrew Niccol, respectively, comment on two very different kinds of personal reality. Both Rasselas and Truman's realities confine them, but what links the motivations of the two characters are their realizations of their realities' finiteness, and their desire to transcend them.

The description of the entrance to the happy valley in Rasselas reads, "The only passage through which it could be entered, was a cavern that passed under a rock, of which it has long been...