He acknowledges that the interviewer will judge him for his brutally candid tone. The reader is never to forget that what she is reading is constructed–not natural, not ‘real’ (Waugh 16).” The narrator of “#20” is a fully-fledged character in his own story, while also narrating the anecdote within it, calling to attention the story as a story and making it a part of him rather than having himself (as a narrator) be a part of the story. “The narrator of a metafictional work will call attention to the writing process itself. That’s usually how complicated metafiction gets, and this is DFW on his easiest setting.Īlthough implicit in many other types of fictional works, self-reflexivity often becomes the dominant subject of postmodern fiction. “#20, 12-96, New Haven, CT, ” – an excerpt from this collection – is constructed with the narrator telling a story about an anecdote relayed by a different character in his story. Wallace’s writing is aware that it will be criticized and deconstructs that very idea in his collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Writing in a postmodern world means knowing that your writing will be analyzed, and Wallace expresses his own anxiety over this phenomenon through metafiction that addresses the reader he knows is judging him.
David Foster Wallace gained fame practicing such writing, using irony and self-reflexivity to challenge the boundaries of fiction. It is specifically fiction about fiction, forcing readers to be aware that they are reading a fictional work, with the author maintaining a very direct relationship with the reader. Patricia Waugh describes metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 2).
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