metanarrator

A metanarrator is a narrator who explicitly acknowledges that they are narrating a story or who comments on the act and process of narration within a work. It is a device associated with metafiction, a broader tendency for fiction to self-consciously address its own fictionality. A metanarrator may address the reader directly, interrupt the plot to discuss structure or authorship, or shift between narrative frames.

The metanarrator’s presence often signals that questions of authority, representation, and interpretation are part of the text’s focus. This contrasts with a traditional narrator who simply reports events, and with an unreliable narrator who misleads without drawing attention to the fictionality of the act of narration itself. In some cases, a metanarrator blends with frame narration or multiple narrators to foreground the construction of the story.

Techniques commonly associated with metanarrators include direct audience address, second-person narration, frame stories, and deliberate commentary on narrative choices, endings, or the limits of knowledge within the fiction. These devices invite readers to reflect on how stories are made and who controls them, and they can create distance or playfulness that challenges conventional storytelling.

Notable examples often cited in discussions of metafiction include Don Quixote, which features a self-aware narrator; Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which foregrounds the act of telling a story; Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, with a guiding metanarrator addressing the reader; and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, where the narrator comments on the text’s construction and possible endings.