The Importance of Metafiction as a Literary Device in the...

The Vietnam War was a period of history in which some great pieces of fiction were created. The Things They Carried, by Tim OBrien is a great example of one of these pieces of fiction. A big part of this novel was OBriens theme of metafiction. Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. This in another sense means that metafiction is the act of writing about writing. This literary device is used in The Things They Carried, as OBriens method to systematically remind his readers that the stories that he is telling are fiction but that sometimes stories can be more real than reality itself. OBrien explains the concept of stories and what role they serve to the storyteller at the end of one†¦show more content†¦And through the use of metafiction he is able to convey this to his readers. OBrien continually uses metafiction as a means to describe to the reader how stories are told and why they are told in such a way. He does this to clarify to his audience that these stories he is writing are indeed fiction, but are loosely based off of experiences that occurred during the Vietnam War. Also, just because a story is deemed as fiction, does not mean that some parts are not true. But in fact, using a fictional story to make someone understand an actual experience can be very beneficial to the listener. This makes the person comprehend the reality of the situation even if it was not a story about reality itself, but based off of real events. The use of metafiction in The Things They Carried, stresses the importance of bringing to our attention the function of stories and what purpose they serve to theShow MoreRelatedThe Hours - Film Analysis12007 Words   |  49 PagesMrs. Brown narrate one day in the life of Laura Brown, living in Los Angeles in 1949, who on that day be gins to read Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours, a postmodernist fabric woven out of intertextual references, uses pastiche as its primary rhetorical device. Pastiche, like parody, involves the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles (Jameson 113), but in contrast to parody, the compilation of both the forms and the contents of anterior texts is neither necessarily critical of its sources