metafictional

Metafictional is an adjective describing fiction that self-consciously addresses its status as a constructed artifact or draws attention to the act of storytelling. Metafiction, the broader practice, uses self-reflexivity to undermine or examine the boundaries between fiction and reality, the roles of author and reader, and the illusion of seamless narration.

Characteristics include authorial intrusion or commentary by narrators, explicit statements about the act of writing, interruptions of the plot, unreliable narration, frame narratives, and intertextual references that remind readers they are reading a book. Metafiction often breaks the fourth wall, acknowledges its own fictionality, or plays with multiple levels of narration. It is commonly associated with postmodernism but appears in various forms across different periods.

Prominent examples: Jorge Luis Borges's Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) and other stories that question authorship and textuality; Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), with an intricate, self-aware commentary surrounding a poem and its editors; Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (1979), a novel about reading and the act of writing; John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968); Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy (1985–86).

Significance: metafiction challenges traditional realism, invites reader participation, and serves as a tool of critical inquiry into how stories are made, who controls interpretation, and how language mediates experience. Critics sometimes view it as self-indulgent, but it remains a central technique in postmodern or experimental literature.