Metafiction in Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

Abstract

My dissertation is an exploration of techniques of metafiction in Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth and J.M. Coetzee’s novel Slow Man. It will examine both novels’ narrative structures and strategies closely, demonstrating the ways in which these strategies place the novels within the broad category of metafiction, reflecting the classifications and comments of critics in the field. I will begin with an overview of what metafiction is and does, grounding my argument upon Patricia Waugh’s seminal ideas in her study, Metafiction, moving on to discuss metafiction as a construction of postmodernism in the light of scholars like Brian McHale, Bran Nicol and Cristopher Nash. My argument will emphasise the idea that metafiction raises questions about the nature and ontology of fiction, and moreover that it blurs distinctions between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ within and without the text. In my close-reading of the two novels at hand, I will run through each plotline and point out elements of storytelling that form part of the underlying metafictional scheme of the whole. I will demonstrate the way that many of the novels’ elements including plot, structure, genre and narrative style contribute towards this scheme. Most importantly, I will stress that it is primarily the interplay between different intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds, or levels, that underpins the metafiction in both novels, raising questions relating to ontologies of character and fictional worlds. I will discuss the implications of setting up overlapping levels of narrative in both novels, showing how this dynamic – or ‘Chinese-box’ structure, as some theorists would have it – places the reader in an investigative, operative position that differs to what can be interpreted as a more ‘passive’ role in traditional realism. I will posit this as one of the several ways in which metafiction, particularly when it is deliberate and overt, as in these two novels, subverts conventions of narrative in traditions preceding it.