Metfictional Paradox of the Powerless Author in the fiction of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Ntozake Shange

Postmodern literary theory has re-invented Roland Barthes’ notorious notion of the ‘death of the author’ in the form of the metafictional paradox of the powerless author. Here the author himself/herself enters the arena of quest for meaning. He/she makes the readers conscious of the author's role in the fiction making process. The author announces at once his/her power and deviates so drastically from that stated position so as to present the dichotomy of the situation. The reader is left to grapple in the midst of the multiple perspectives offered by the metafictional text. The narrator skillfully impresses the reader to believe in their version of the story then suddenly challenges that very version as fictive. The purpose of the metafictional author is to reveal the fictional quality of the work. In other words, metafiction is self-reflexive in nature. Deceiving the readers at that very juncture when they had taken the narrative for granted. The African American women novelists discussed here viz., Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Ntozake Shange have all used the baffling mode of metafiction. The following article is an attempt to illustrate the extent of their experiments in this genre.