Metafiction

Metafiction is about breaking the illusion

Postmodern texts are often experimental in style and play with the norms of storytelling. This is why metafiction is a common stylistic device in postmodern texts. Metafiction basically means that the author somehow makes the readers aware that what they are reading is just fiction - a story constructed by an author - and nothing more. 

This means that the readers become unable to immerse themselves in the story because they are forced to reflect on the process of reading, writing, and creating stories. The illusion of the story being true is constantly broken.

Metafiction comes in many forms. We outline some of them below. Note that many of these devices, such as the unreliable narrator, were in use already before postmodernism but became very popular during the postmodern era.

The death of the author

Postmodernists believe that the author is no longer an authority figure. He is not a genius delivering his insights to the world; he is just an ordinary person making up a story. This is referred to as “the death of the author”. 

One way which the author can ‘kill off’ his authority is by having an author as the main character in his text. It might even be the author so that the character shares his name and certain characteristics. In Tim O’Brien’s short story series The Things They Carried (1990) the main character is called Tim O’Brien and fights in the Vietnam War just like the real O’Brien did. In movies, the equivalent would be making the main character an actor or screenwriter.

Another way would be by making references to storytelling, to telling the...