METAFICTION

'Metafiction' is, literally, 'fiction about fiction'. More generally, it is a type of relatively modern fiction which deliberately draws attention to its own artificiality. That is, the reader is never allowed to fully 'lose' him or herself in the text; there is no real 'suspension of disbelief'.

Various literary devices can be associated with metafictive writing - unreliable narrators, characters using direct address (or 'breaking the fourth wall'), non-linear narratives, an intrusive narrative voice, alternative endings, very obviously clumsy 'literary' writing, or whatever - basically, anything which DELIBERATELY reminds the reader that they are engaging with an artificial text. (If it's not deliberate, it's just lousy writing!)

Why would anyone do this? Consider these extracts from Bao Ninh's **//The Sorrow of War://**

"It was necessary to write about the war, to touch readers' hearts, to move them forward with words of love and sorrow, to bring to life the electric moments, to let them, in the reading and the telling, feel they were there, in the past, with the author.'

"Is this the author who avoids reading anything about any war, the Vietnam war or any other great war? The one who is frightened by war stories? Yet who himself cannot stop writing war stories, stories of rifles firing, bombs dropping, enemies and comrades, wet and dry seasons in battle. In fact, the one who can't write about anything else.'

Why does he continually interrupt his own narrative with these addresses to the reader? What does his adoption of this metafictive style add to his novel? Does it make the novel better?

=BACK TO THE SORROW OF WAR= =BACK TO WORLD LIT=