Heller’s Metafictional Writing as Exemplified by Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man

Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man (2000) is the last novel by Joseph Heller,one of the representative postmodernist American writers.It is a work perfectly embodying his metafictinal technique.Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man is a subversion and destruction of the traditional novel and narrative form in all its content,form and language.In Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man,comments are made on itself in the very process of the fiction.Breaking the obvious dividing line between writing and criticism and blending them in form,Portrait of an Artist,as an Old Man thus makes a typical about fiction i.e.metafiction.By analyzing the concept of interpretation and decomposition,parody and intertextuality in Heller’s fictional writing,the reader can obtain a more appropriate understanding of how Heller concretizes in such a typical metafiction his metaphysical musings on the fictional nature of literature.