Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author mostly known for another of her titles, The Handmaid’s Tale, but she has also written pieces that explore the other fundamentals of writing and how to approach and subvert the craft to expand its horizons. This particular short story, “Happy Endings,” is in the genre of metafiction, where a writer breaks what is called “the fourth wall” and destroys the barriers between the world that is created and its creator. Examples of this have been seen throughout the history of writing, but the term itself was not coined until 1970—three years after Roland Barthes wrote his infamous essay “The Death of the Author” (even Atwood comments in the prelude at how disappointed she was that someone else came up with the
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Those who choose to do this also risk creating a sense of “intentional fallacy,” a theory created by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, in which authors include their own intetions in the text itself. Metafiction makes this task unavoidable, as they both seem to merge into one entity. While the line between the two disappears in this particular genre, this concept may force the author to become responsible for both the internal and the external aspects in each of their works. Once this is achived, Atwood believes that the real social discourse comes from questioning the many ways a narrative can be structured and …show more content…
By doing so, she pulls back the curtain to reveal how plot devices and character traits are turned into something formulaic and predictable. She also illuminates how difficult it can be to pull away from such a temptation. By making this piece metafiction, she also exposes and twists the roles of both the author and the reader. Metafiction continues to strip away and change the relationship between both roles, and each time the author makes themselves more present in their own creation, they contradict Barthes’s statement and keeps themselves “alive” even after the piece and their role in it is over. If removing the authority of the reader, and changing the position of the author, is the only way that the author can become creatively immortal, then stories like this suggest that not only may it be possible but show others how it can be done. That may be creating the greatest sense of narrative discourse of
Those who choose to do this also risk creating a sense of “intentional fallacy,” a theory created by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, in which authors include their own intetions in the text itself. Metafiction makes this task unavoidable, as they both seem to merge into one entity. While the line between the two disappears in this particular genre, this concept may force the author to become responsible for both the internal and the external aspects in each of their works. Once this is achived, Atwood believes that the real social discourse comes from questioning the many ways a narrative can be structured and …show more content…
By doing so, she pulls back the curtain to reveal how plot devices and character traits are turned into something formulaic and predictable. She also illuminates how difficult it can be to pull away from such a temptation. By making this piece metafiction, she also exposes and twists the roles of both the author and the reader. Metafiction continues to strip away and change the relationship between both roles, and each time the author makes themselves more present in their own creation, they contradict Barthes’s statement and keeps themselves “alive” even after the piece and their role in it is over. If removing the authority of the reader, and changing the position of the author, is the only way that the author can become creatively immortal, then stories like this suggest that not only may it be possible but show others how it can be done. That may be creating the greatest sense of narrative discourse of