A mente que narra: leitura metaficcional de The Daydreamer, de Ian McEwan

Abstract

The studies of metafictional narratives is evidently relevant for the understanding of fictional construction since they tend to reveal the writing process through its own diegesis. In this sense, Ian McEwan's novel The Daydreamer distinguishes itself by representing the creation of fictional narratives through imagination. In order to examine how metafiction is built in the narrative of The Daydreamer, this research is based on the defining theories of metafiction postulated by Linda Hutcheon, Patricia Waugh and Gustavo Bernardo. The specific objectives of this research are to analyze what are the metafictional resources that compose the novel and to examine how such resources dramatize the writing process. With this target in mind, we observed that the narrative of The Daydreamer can be divided into two levels: linguistic and diegetic structural, which present some viable resources for the building up of the metafictionality in the work. The analysis of these resources allowed us to see how metafictionality can be constructed through the handling of language and diegesis to produce effects on the act of reading, such as sonority, repetition and irony, or represent the transition between dimensions, or elicit a critical reading or, also, represent the process of creation and interpretation of the narrative, by making the process of writing visible. Imagination, in turn, as a central theme in The Daydreamer, mirrors the fictional construction of the novel.