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Essay on Review of a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with its unique style that attracts the attention of the reader from the very beginning is a good example of self reflexive fiction. Self reflexive fiction, improving and changing from the time of Tristram Shandy has found a new life at the hands of Dave Eggers. He offers the reader to take an active role in his reading. "The Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book" section addresses directly to the reader saying "if you have already read the preface and wish you had not, we apologize"or he begins the second part saying "Please look. Can you see us?"At the end, the book becomes very much self reflexive as he addresses to the millions who are reading him in nearly two full pages. When …show more content…

He suddenly begins to talk about some ideas that cross his mind or a dialogue begins, changing the linear movement of the story. But life, just like metafictional novels is also constructed through frames and many things happen one after another rather than the artificial novels which only talk about one aspect of our experiences in a strict order. But not every person can reflect his complex experiences and ideas in a unity as nicely as Eggers does. Eggers, in his book writes about what he experiences physically and mentally so naturally, juxtaposing the two different kinds of experiences and this way the reader "lives" the story more than just reading it. For example, if he is thinking about something else, when he is talking to someone, he directly writes about his thoughts just after giving the dialogue between them. He alters the frames so suddenly and this is called the deconstructive method of metafiction. With these shifts, the reader's ideas about the reality change constantly. There are multiple realities and they are related to each other. Eggers always sticks to realism but in some parts, we see his attempts to be fictionalized when he says "Give me something. I promise I will be good. I will be sad and hopeful. Please see this! I am the common multiplier for 47 million... Give me a platform!" during his interview to take part in the MTV production. Metafiction writers

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