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Metafiction fails because it does not invite us inside but rather makes us stand back and watch the author look at his own reflection; the reader is left outside, alone, and the one thing Mark hates more than anything in the world is "to believe he is alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian m…

Having declared that language is ultimately self-referential, Barth has also affirmed that novels themselves, because they do not refer directly to a knowable reality, unavoidably refer instead to other novels. This latter idea directly informs his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," discussed at…