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The Function Of Self-Consciousness In John Barth's Chimera, Marilyn Edelstein

English

Much recent American fiction has become increasingly self-conscious, displaying an awareness of itself as fiction, as artifice that diminishes the role of a central human consciousness or self in the fiction. The fictional process is in the foreground of much contemporary fiction where the narrative human presence once was. Yet, both fictional process and human presence serve similar structural functions within the text, which suggests that the creation of a fiction resembles the creation of a human self, real or imaginary. The provisional reality of self-conscious fiction is like the provisional reality of the "post-modern" self, prone to self-questioning, constituted …