Metafiction is fiction that knows it's fiction —
fiction that draws attention to its own status as a constructed text
and makes that self-awareness part of the work. The word was popularized
by the critic William H. Gass in 1970, but the technique is much older.
The first European novel, Don Quixote, is partly a piece of
metafiction.
The defining move
A metafictional work foregrounds at least one of these:
The author writing. The narrator mentions writing
the book, struggling with a sentence, choosing between endings.
The reader reading. The text addresses the reader
directly, or comments on what the reader is doing.
The fictionality of the world. Characters discuss
the book they are in, meet their author, or escape the page.
The conventions of the form. The text comments on
the rules of the genre it inhabits — what novels are supposed to
do, what readers are supposed to expect.
The long history
Don Quixote (1605, 1615). In Part Two, Don Quixote
discovers that someone has written Part One; he is now a character
who has read his own book.
Tristram Shandy (1759–67). Sterne's novel is
constantly interrupting itself, complaining about its own
digressions, and including blank pages.
If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Italo
Calvino's novel is addressed to "you, the reader," who keeps
starting different novels and failing to finish them.
Pale Fire (1962). Nabokov's novel is a 999-line
poem with a commentary that gradually reveals the commentator's
delusions.
House of Leaves (2000). Mark Z. Danielewski's
novel uses typography, footnotes, and missing pages as
metafictional architecture.
Why writers use it
To break realism's illusion. Realist fiction
pretends to be a transparent window onto a world. Metafiction
reminds you the window is glass — manufactured, framed, chosen.
To make form into content. The novel's structure
becomes part of its meaning. A book about the impossibility of
finishing a book is doing something realist fiction cannot.
To implicate the reader. When the text speaks to
the reader, the reader's act of reading becomes part of the
story.
Postmodernism's signature
Metafiction became central to postmodern literature in the late 20th
century. Writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and
Kathy Acker used it to argue, in fiction itself, that fiction's
relationship to reality was more complicated than the realist tradition
admitted.
Metafiction vs. its neighbors
Magical realism bends physical reality but rarely
points at the fictional frame itself. (See our
entry on magical realism.)
The unreliable narrator destabilizes the truth
within the fiction; metafiction destabilizes the fiction
itself.
Breaking the fourth wall (in drama and film) is
metafiction's stagecraft cousin.
How to read it
When you encounter metafiction, do not look for the "story behind
the story." The story is the layering. Ask what the
self-awareness is doing — playful? Mournful? Philosophical? The most
interesting metafiction uses the device to ask serious questions about
truth, representation, and the relationship between writer and reader.
The least interesting uses it as a trick.
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