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GATE 2021 XH2 – Question 60

Literary Forms, Genres, and Modes of Expression · Aesthetic and Rhetorical Strategies: Narrative and poetic techniques, and figures of speech · 2 marks · Multiple select

Which situations are examples of metafiction?

  1. Different characters narrate successive chapters.
  2. A reader becomes a character and interrupts because the text being read is incomplete.
  3. A traveller meets a man embodying colonial horror,who then tells his own story.
  4. A shabbily dressed man encountered by a character announces to readers that he is the novel’s author and is deciding the character’s future.

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Show answer and explanation

Correct answer: (B) A reader becomes a character and interrupts because the text being read is incomplete.; (D) A shabbily dressed man encountered by a character announces to readers that he is the novel’s author and is deciding the character’s future.

Explanation

Metafiction draws attention to the work’s own construction as fiction. B makes reading and textual incompleteness part of the story, and D exposes authorship within the fictional world. A is multiple narration and C an embedded narrative; neither alone makes the work self-reflexively metafictional. Select B,D.

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