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David Diaz

A classmate recently noted some of the limitations and flattening in narrative that exists from realist modes of storytelling. They mentioned that sex is mostly absent from best selling novels and other popular forms of narrative, despite... more
A classmate recently noted some of the limitations and flattening in narrative that exists from realist modes of storytelling. They mentioned that sex is mostly absent from best selling novels and other popular forms of narrative, despite sex being a natural process in everyday life. The lens which reality is presented is always going to be skewed based on who is telling the story and what details they wish to disclose or omit, always in a sense, limiting other perspectives. Is there a way to navigate bias in narrative? Perhaps a narrator who has calculated every possible perspective before typing a single word? This is unlikely. Something that may be more effective would be to examine the way in which narration limits the process of its own storytelling by thoroughly examining the narrative. This is known as the metanarrative of a text. In the case of this paper, we will examine the metanarrative to look at the short stories of John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges respectively to see how they explore the limitations of language and traditional storytelling in their metafictional stories, Lost in the Funhouse and The Garden of Forking Paths. These stories explore their own processes that make them works of fiction, thus works of metafiction. Metafiction allows us to look at the metanarrative of a story through its form.
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