Goffman's Metafiction

My textual transformation relies heavily on modernist framing structures and, more importantly, its post-modern counterpart 'metafiction'. Metafiction is already seen in some of Shakespeare's plays, such as Macbeth and Midsummer's Night Dream, and works as a framing device that draws attention to the fact the reader is reading (or watching) a play. It is a regular plot device used to draw highlight the paradoxical nature of the 'framed' and the 'unframed', or as Patricia Waugh says in Metafiction, 'form' and 'content' (2001: 31). The reader or viewer becomes aware of what they are viewing and, usually through such literary conventions as parody, are made to question the nature of the play or work and to try and decipher the 'frame-break'.

The 'frame-break' is an elusive concept derived from Erving Goffman's study into narrative structures and linguistic frameworks, and is meant to question the reality/fiction dichotomy (1974: 560). Goffman suggests that our sense of reality is strong enough to cope

When Romeo stops her it is him stopping the frame from breaking further, and that is when 'the ceiling erupted, tremors wrecked my body as I lay back'. This is the act of the author fighting back against his self-aware characters. The ceiling then falls and begins to mould Juliet in clay. I wanted to create a situation in which Juliet would transcend into a trope and be sent to every corner of the earth, ascending above her character and becoming universal. This obviously becomes more difficult and complicated as the act of creating a character into a trope is my doing, whereas before we could assume it was Shakespeare standing behind the 'shimmering ceiling'. This creates a triple-locked narrative which becomes only more complicated as we introduce the voices of the future