Toward a semiotics of metafiction: Narrative, narration, and postmodern parody

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.