The Metafictionality Of Milan Kundera’s Novels

As a French writer of Czech origin,Milan Kundera’s novels embody a distinct metafictionality.He consciously puts reflection and examination of the novel-writing process into the language and structure of the novel’s narrative,which makes his works have a prominent self-reflexive character.This paper consists of three parts: the introduction,the body and the conclusion.The introductory part consists of a literature review and a definition survey,which discusses the definition and characteristics of metafiction,and thus defines the relationship between metafictionality and metafiction,and sorts out the concepts for the whole paper.The author argues that metafiction consciously places the process of reflection in itself,but metafictional characteristics as a literary function are not limited to metafiction,and therefore metafictionality is not limited to the genre of metafiction.The main part of the text focuses on three aspects of the metafictionality that Kundera’s novels possess.First,the chapter on breaking the boundaries of fiction describes the destruction of the fictional integrity of Kundera’s work by metafictional features from two aspects: on the one hand,the author’s invasion,in which the author reveals himself to talk about his own work,highlighting the self-reference of the owner of the work;on the other hand,the author consciously uses perspective shifting,confusing time and space,and the historical compilation of metafictional forms to dismantle the objective reality of the work,thus achieving the goal of opposing imitation of reality and highlighting On the other hand,the author consciously uses perspective shifting,confusing space and history to dismantle the objective reality of the work,thus achieving the goal of opposing imitation of reality and highlighting artificial writing.Secondly,the imitation of critical activity in the fictional text is described.In addition to the imitation of the works of his predecessors and literary conventions,Kundera’s novels highlight the artificiality of the creation of novels based on past texts,in addition to the imitation of critical activity in the texts,the criticism of others’ works,his own works and even classical music in the form of novels,which set up a reflective mirror for the narrative part.The metafictional form that characterizes Kundera’s work is again explored.In his novels,Kundera uses a mixture of genres,making the work not a unified discourse of the narrator,but an orgy of textual forms;in the structure of the novels,he uses polyphony and a long novel form that resembles a collection of short stories,and his self-reflection on the narrative of the novels also highlights the metafictionality of his novels.The final chapter is a retrospective and a conclusion.It is an exploration of the origins of Kundera’s metafictionality and a summary of the artistic goals he pursues through the use of metafictionality.Metafictionality is often associated with deconstruction and the dissolution of meaning in postmodern contexts;for Kundera,however,metafictionality becomes a tool for placing the writer’s self and explaining the meaning of his work for the reader.It can be said that both the internal content and the external form of metafictionality have become the intersection of Kundera’s literary theory and practice.