undermining the contrived fictionality of the ending of the novel. Jan Mark’s Finders
Losers opens with a note addressed to a narratee which describes the relationship
between the narrative and the narratee (and by analogy the text and its readers) in
terms which constitute the story and its meanings as being constructed by the narratee
rather than as being artefacts of the text: ‘By the time you have read all six [stories] you
will know exactly what happened on that day, and why, but you’ll be the only one who
does’ (1990:6). The second person pronoun usually refers to a narratee, but is also used
to directly address an implied reader (as in ‘choose your own adventure’ novels). When it
is used more extensively—as it is in Peter Dickinson’s Giant Cold (1984) and the opening
of Peter Hunt’s Backtrack (1986)—its referential function can be more ambiguous,
having a disruptive effect on the relations between text and reader.
Narrative forms: mystery, fantasy, games and readersHutcheon describes specific narrative forms which can function as internalised
structuring devices to represent reading positions and strategies (1980:71–86). The
mystery is a common device whereby a character’s quest to solve a central mystery is
represented as analogous to a reader’s struggle with the text (Stephens 1993:102).
Combined with an extensive use of character focalisers whose viewpoints are limited,
partial and selective and who consistently misinterpret events, this strategy can be used
to construct implied readers in a position of superior knowledge, as in Garfield’s parody
of Conan Doyle in the character Selwyn Raven, in The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris.
Further, Stephens has shown how Mayne uses these strategies in Salt River Times (1980)
and Winter Quarters (1982) to express an ‘analogy between interpreting human
situations and reading fictions’ (1993:102). A variation on this structuring device is the
construction of a mystery which remains unsolved, for example Hunt’s Backtrack or
Gary Crew’s Strange Objects (1990). The focus becomes, not so much the mystery itself,
but the interpretive processes and discourses through which characters attempt to
produce solutions.
Fantasy and game genres are also used as internalised structuring devices which point
to the self-referentiality of a text. A fantasy text constructs an autonomous universe with
its own rules and laws. Metafictive fantasies draw attention to the temporal and spatial
structuration of this world—its geography, history, culture— and the role of readers in
the act of imagining it and giving shape to the referents of words (Hutcheon 1980:76). In
this way, the reading of metafictive fantasies is ‘emblematic’ of the reading of fiction in
general (81).
The ‘choose your own adventure’ novel is a relatively recent popular genre which
explicitly constructs readers as ‘players’ in a fictional game and as active participants in
the construction of the story. Readers construct characters from an assortment of traits
and roles, and at each narrative juncture readers are offered a choice, usually from two
or three possible narrative paths leading to a range of possible endings—see for example
Steve Jackson’s and Ian Livingstone’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982). This is a
highly conventionalised and codified genre, which can potentially teach its readers
specific narrative conventions, as well as implicitly reinforce social codes. It is not, in
itself, particularly metafictional, though it does clearly have a metafictive potential which
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