Abstract

Both Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and John Hawkes' Travesty (1976) employ unconventional and unsettling narrative strategies: unconventional in that these works deliberately flout the traditions of the conventional canonical novel, and unsettling as a result of techniques consciously and deliberately adopted by the narrator of each work. The unconventionality and the deliberate assault on the reader's expectations are both characteristic of metafictions--those self-conscious texts which demand that the reader react intensely to the world of the text while simultaneously acknowledging its fictionality. As Linda Hutcheon observes, metafiction is characterized by paradox.

How to Cite:

Rundle, V., (1989) “The Double Bind of Metafiction: Implicating Narrative in The Crying of Lot 49 and Travesty”, Pynchon Notes , 31-44. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pn.291