The study focuses on the concept of the lifeworld, which was developed by representatives of phenomenological philosophy and philosophy of existentialism. The lifeworld arises as a pre-scientific understanding of the world as a certain horizon of knowledge, interrelationships and unifying meaning. Because such an understanding is tied to subjective experience, it escapes scientific descriptions, that explain the world mainly on the basis of objective facts. The aim of this study is to explain why literary narratives can represent the lifeworld better than its scientific interpretations. Fictional narratives can better capture the temporal, dynamic, but also paradoxical nature of the world's understanding, so they reach the reader more deeply and intimately. We define the process of reading as an activity associated with the semiosis of the lifeworld, which has a fictional essence from a logical-ontological point of view, but part of the reader's cooperation is also the updating of the real world and personal experiences. Text strategies even take this into account and expect the reader to understand the fictional world similarly to the real world.