On Vonnegut's Artistic Innovation of Metafiction

Metafiction contains comments on its own narrative and language characteristics within the fiction. Vonnegut's metafictional texts not only examine the narrative structure of fiction but also effectively deepen the themes of his works. Slaughterhouse-Five allures the reader to participate in the discussion of war and death through its metafictional form. Breakfast of Champions,an anti-traditional novel,reveals a very common theme of black humor:science is still incapable of solving the problems of absurdity and meaninglessness of postmodern human life. The play-within-the-play metafiction in Deadeye Dick shows that contemporary human beings are in a dangerous social and ecological environment of self-destruction.