Toward a Semiotics of Metafiction - Narrative, Narration, and Postmodern Parody

Abstract

This paper represents an attempt to account for the
epistemologically indeterminate nature of metafiction and its
deliberate destabilization of its own ontological and linguistic
systems. Through an analysis of the parodic mechanism of
metafiction, its semiotic structure, and its relationship to myth,
this paper argues that these inherent compositional instabilities
act to expand the agency of the narrator. This narratorial
expansion results in a number of significant shifts in narrative
structure. This paper contends that, as the narrator’s agency
increases, new directions and multiplicities of meaning and
interpretation open up. This narratorial expansion not only acts
to integrate the reader more interactively in the narrative, the
reader becomes the very ground upon which the metafictional
narrative establishes and/or de-establishes its own capacity for
interpretation.