Metafiction - Various Devices of Metafiction

Various Devices of Metafiction

Some common metafictive devices in literature include:

• A story about a writer creating a story (e.g. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, Stephen King's Misery and Secret Window, Secret Garden, Ian McEwan's Atonement, The Counterfeiters by André Gide, John Irving's The World According to Garp, Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea by Michael Morpurgo, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Oracle Night by Paul Auster, More Bears! by Kenn Nesbitt, and Cy Coleman's 1989 Tony Award best musical, City of Angels)
• A story about a reader reading a book (e.g. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and The Princess Bride by William Goldman)
• A story that features itself (as a narrative or as a physical object) as its own prop or MacGuffin. Cornelia Funke's Inkheart (which also plays a role in the sequels),The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis and Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin's The Jamais Vu Papers), and developed to an extreme in Ira Levin's 1978 play, Deathtrap.
• A story containing another work of fiction within itself (e.g. The Laughing Man, The Dark Tower, The Iron Dream, The Crying of Lot 49, Sophie's World, A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire, The Princess Bride, The Island of the Day Before, Steppenwolf, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Man in the High Castle, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
• A story addressing the specific conventions of story, such as title, character conventions, paragraphing or plots. (e.g. Lost in the Funhouse and On with the Story by John Barth, The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle or Stephen Sondheim's musical, Into the Woods.)
• A novel where the narrator intentionally exposes him or herself as the author of the story (e.g. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Razor's Edge, Mister B. Gone, The Unbearable Lightness of Being,The Plague, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, The BFG, O Tempo e o Vento, The Museum of Innocence, Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring, The French Lieutenant's Woman, A Series of Unfortunate Events).
• A book in which the book itself seeks interaction with the reader (e.g., Willie Masters' Lonely Wife by William H. Gass, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, or Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems).
• A story in which the readers of the story itself force the author to change the story (e.g. More Bears! by Kenn Nesbitt)
• Narrative footnotes, which continue the story while commenting on it (e.g. Nabokov's Pale Fire, House of Leaves, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Alan Moore's From Hell, Cable & Deadpool by Fabian Nicieza, An Abundance of Katherines by John Green, Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer, many books by Robert Rankin and the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett).
• A story in which the characters are aware that they are in a story (e.g., Redshirts by John Scalzi, the Henry Potty parody series, and various works by Robert Rankin).
• An autobiographical fiction in which the main character, by the last parts of the book, has written the first parts and is reading some form of it to an audience (Shoplifting from American Apparel) by Tao Lin

Films which use metafictive devices include Adaptation, which wraps metafictively around the real-world non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, and Barton Fink, as well as the thrillers The Usual Suspects, Memento and Inception. Examples of other media which take part in metafictiveness are Al Capp's Fearless Fosdick in Li'l Abner, the Tales of the Black Freighter in Watchmen, or the Itchy and Scratchy Show within The Simpsons, as well as the computer game Myst in which the player represents a person who has found a book named Myst and been transported inside it.

The theme of metafiction may be central to the work, as in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) or as in Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, Chapter XIV, in which the narrator talks about the literary devices used in the other chapters. But as a literary device, metafiction has become a frequent feature of postmodernist literature. Examples such as If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, "a novel about a person reading a novel" is an exercise in metafiction. Contemporary author Paul Auster has made metafiction the central focus of his writing and is probably the best known active novelist specialising in the genre. Often metafiction figures for only a moment in a story, as when "Roger" makes a brief appearance in Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber.

It can be used in multiple ways within one work. For example, novelist Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam War veteran, writes in his short story collection The Things They Carried about a character named "Tim O'Brien" and his war experiences in Vietnam. Tim O'Brien, as the narrator, comments on the fictionality of some of the war stories, commenting on the "truth" behind the story, though all of it is characterized as fiction. In the story chapter How to Tell a True War Story, O'Brien comments on the difficulty of capturing the truth while telling a war story. In Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, King himself appears as a pivotal character set with the task of writing The Dark Tower books so that the main characters can continue their quest. Other Stephen King books, and characters from them, are mentioned in the narrative. In an afterword to the series finale, (The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower), King details why he chose to include himself in his novel. And in James Patterson's Alex Cross series, Along Came a Spider is both the book written by Patterson and a book written by Cross about the events depicted in the book.

One of the most sophisticated treatments of the concept of the novel in a novel occurs in Muriel Spark's debut, The Comforters. Spark imbues Caroline, her central character, with voices in her head which constitutes the narration Spark has just set down on the page. In the story Caroline is writing a critical work on the form of the novel when she begins to hear a tapping typewriter (accompanied by voices) through the wall of her house. The voices dictate a novel to her, in which she believes herself to be a character. The reader is thereby continually drawn to the narrative structure, which in turn is the story, i.e. a story about storytelling which itself disrupts the conventions of storytelling. At no point does Spark as author enter the narrative however, remaining omniscient throughout and adhering to the conventions of third-person narration.

According to Patricia Waugh "all fiction is . . . implicitly metafictional," since all works of literature are concerned with language and literature itself. Some elements of metafiction are similar to devices used in metafilm techniques.