"A Departure and a Return: Back to Self-expression"

Abstract

This article investigates the literary phenomenon of self-referentiality in a contemporary American writer, Charles Baxter. The author makes a personal appearance in a presumably objective tale of description and representation. Analysis finds the author’s desire to comment on his own act of narration and to disclose its contradictions and limitations to the reader a motivating force behind the move. Though keeping with the self-reflexive mode of modern fiction, Baxter adds to the modernists’ recognition of lost claims to imitation and representation by criticizing their acts of creation. Self-critically he asserts that creation takes contemporary practice back to the subjective, self-expressive and self-assertive narrative conventions of the eighteenth and the nineteenth-century.