Med denne study guide får du overblik over Margaret Atwoods novelle “Happy Endings”, som findes i lærebogen Wider Contexts (ss. 69-73) under temaet “Love”.
Margaret Atwood (f. 1939) er en prisvindende canadisk forfatter. Hun skriver både romaner og noveller og er kendt for at behandle problemstillinger som kvinderettigheder og miljøproblemer. Novellen “Happy Endings” er en del af novellesamlingen Murder in the Dark.
Metafiction
The short story “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood uses a number of words related to literature and writing, for example: “this is the thin part of the plot” (p. 71, ll. 37-38), “the rest of the story is about what caused the tidal wave” (p. 72, ll. 4-5), “lustful saga” (p. 72, l. 20), and “chronicle of our times” (p. 72, ll. 20-21). This points to the text’s characteristics as metafiction, meaning a type of fiction that talks about writing and reminds the readers they are dealing with a fictional world.
Also, the narrator mentions that plots are just “a series of one thing after another, a what and a what and a what” (p. 72, l. 34), urging the reader to “try How and Why” (p. 72, l. 35). The narrator often addressing the reader directly, involving them in the construction of the story, is another element of metafiction. Also, by writing “How” and “Why” in capital letters, the author could be trying to indicate that circumstances and motivations are the only things that make stories different from each other, as otherwise everything ends up the same.
