Metafiction

Metafiction

Multiple Choice

Who is the narrator of "Sweeheart of the Song Tra Bong"?

• Tim O'Brien
• Mark Fossie

• Rat Kiley
• Mary Anne

Open Ended

Can you think of anything we've read in (or out of) class that is a frame story?

Mr. Lockwood's narrative provides a framing device for the story about the Earnshaws and Lintons.

Wuthering Heights

The District Commissioner at the end frames Okonkwo's death as a fascinating story to put into the book he is writing.

Things Fall Apart

​The narrator meets a strange man who tells him a story about being trapped on a train in the midst of a snow storm.

"Cannibalism in the Cars"

Open Ended

What is metafiction?

What is Metafiction?​

The term refers generally to fiction about fiction, and more specifically to novels that call self-conscious attention to their own status as fictions...

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This strategy also allows writers to blur the distinction between text and "reality."

- "Metafiction" by Marshall Boswell

Characteristics

Authors of metafiction often violate narrative levels by:

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• intruding to comment on writing

• ​involving his or herself with fictional characters

• ​directly addressing the reader (breaking the 4th wall)

• ​openly questioning how narrative assumptions and conventions transform and filter reality, trying to ultimately prove that no singular truths or meanings exist  

Open Ended

Can you think of any books, movies, or shows that are/employ metafiction (metanarrative) or break the 4th wall?

In The Things They Carried

For author O'Brien and the self-examiner O'Brien, uncertainty and ambiguity are inherent in his characters' lives and his own; absolute truth and closure are impossible; reality is determined by the angle from which events, the self, and others are viewed: "Everything that I am doing flows out of the life I have led. And the life I have led is a life of finding it hard to distinguish within myself and without what's true and what's not."

- "Tim O'Brien's True Lies" - Tobey Herzog​

Within the war environment, this absence of certainty in establishing boundaries—between facts and fictions, memory and imagination, truth and lies in O'Brien's own life and in the lives of several of his characters—becomes an important formal and thematic device. The resulting narrative confusion and contradiction heighten readers' sense of the chaotic nature of war in general and of America's experience in the Vietnam War in particular.

- "Tim O'Brien's True Lies" - Tobey Herzog​

As numerous historians and cultural critics have observed, many Americans characterize the Vietnam experience as a formless, murky, contradictory, fact-and-fiction filled war. Lies, deception, linguistic obfuscation, conflicting angles of reality, unclear military goals, shifting boundaries, an elusive enemy, often demoralized and confused American soldiers, and America's eventual retreat from Vietnam have contributed to a widely embraced perception of this war as a postmodernist paradigm resisting attempts at sense-making and closure.

- "Tim O'Brien's True Lies" - Tobey Herzog​

Open Ended

What is metafiction?