Metafiction Guide: Understanding Metafiction in Literature

Metafiction is a self-conscious literary style in which the narrator or characters are aware that they are part of a work of fiction. Often most closely associated with postmodern prose, metafiction involves a departure from standard narrative conventions, in which a self-aware narrator infuses their perspective into the text to create a fictional work that comments on fiction. This kind of fictional writing can appear in novels, short stories, plays, video games, film, and television.

The main purpose of metafiction is to highlight the dichotomy between the real world and the fictional world of a novel. Metafiction can be used to parody literary genre conventions, subvert expectations, reveal truths, or offer a view of the human condition. Often used in postmodernist fiction to comment on the world that our character inhabits, metafiction helps give a work of text more significance by providing an outward, exploratory look of a self-contained world.

Metafiction is often distinguishable by a few key characteristics. Here are some common features of metafiction.

1. 1. Breaking the fourth wall: Breaking this boundary between writer and reader blurs the lines between real life and fiction. Metafiction often directly addresses the reader, openly questioning the narrator’s own story.
2. 2. Self-reflexive: Authors use self-reflexivity, or self-consciousness, to reflect on their own artistic processes, drawing the audience’s attention away from the story and allowing them to question the content of the text itself.
3. 3. Experimental: Metafiction is often experimental in nature, fusing a number of different techniques together to create an unconventional narrative. Metafiction can also experiment with the role of the narrator and their relationship to the fictional characters in the story.

There have been many metafictional works written throughout the centuries. Some examples of notable metafiction include:

1. 1. The Canterbury Tales (1387): Geoffrey Chaucer’s classic anthology of interconnected stories that parody the conventional elements of fiction. Chaucer blends linguistic styles and rhetorical devices to craft a collection of stories within the overall story, regularly breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly and apologize for any offense the narrative may cause.
2. 2. Don Quixote (1605): Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote is essentially a book about books. In the prologue, Cervantes breaks the fourth wall by commenting on his process of writing the book, in which he urges the reader to make up their own mind about the written text. The ensuing novel discusses the adventures of the protagonist, Don Quixote, who has gone mad from reading too many chivalric romance stories.
3. 3. Giles Goat-Boy (1966): John Barth’s fourth novel is a prime example of the metafiction characteristic of postmodernism, featuring several fictional disclaimers in the beginning and end, arguing that the book was not written by the author and was instead given to the author on a tape or written by a computer.
4. 4. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969): Written by John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a historiographic metafiction novel about a love story between a gentleman and a governess in the Victorian era. The book features a narrator who becomes part of the story and offers several different ways to end the story.
5. 5. Slaughterhouse Five (1969): In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut includes his own voice as a character in this non-linear narrative. The main character has been “unstuck in time,” oscillating between the present and the past with no control over his movement, emphasizing the senseless nature of war.
6. 6. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973): This story by Thomas Pynchon is the poster child of postmodern literature, using a complex, fragmented structure to cover various subjects such as culture, science, social science, profanity, and literary propriety. In this particular narrative, Pynchon questions history and how it gets created, and also how it affects both society and the individual.

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