Philosophers, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are in no way in agreement as to whether humans have free will, nor as to what can be attributed to the phenomenon of free will and by what means this should be researched. However, this seems to be of little interest to the majority of people in their everyday lives. They simply act as if humans have free will, even if this question does not seem to have been definitively clarified. The philosopher Hans Vaihinger argues similarly in his major work Die Philosophie des Als Ob, in which he explains that metaphysical views are not true in a logical-objective sense, but can only be justified pragmatically: According to him metaphysical ‘truths’ exist in the sense of a ‘useful fiction’. Martina Clavadetscher's 2021 novel Die Erfindung des Ungehorsams  addresses this phenomenon by – according to the thesis of this essay – presenting the concept of free will as a product of as-if narratives. A special focus of the essay is on the levels of the story, the functions of the narrative act itself as well as the depicted sublation of binary schemes such as the human/machine dichotomy.