John Burnside’s The Dumb House : A study on Metafiction Through Its Own Metafictionality

This essay is a study on metafiction within The Dumb House by John Burnside. For metafiction to truly represent self-awareness, it needs to expose not only its fictionality but also its metafictionality, which this essay argues happens in this novel. The theme of identity illustrates metafiction’s limitations because of its attachment to the rules of realism, which is represented in the novel through the narrator, Luke, and his attachment to his childhood with his mother. Additionally, the theme of identity deals with not only Luke’s search for his identity through his narrative, but also the novel’s similar search. This is shown through the novel’s self-begetting nature, illustrating a narrative with a loop of beginnings, depicting identity as a process, like metafiction does. The theme of unreliability deals with Luke’s participation in the experiment he conducts. He is placed in a situation in his narrative similar to the paradox of the reader. He also admits to the unreliability of language in his narrative, which creates an unreliability about his own narrative. Luke searches for his soul through both himself and language, which places him in a complex dilemma, similar to the prisonhouse of language. The very essence of the meaning of language is forced onto the surface and the dilemmas metafiction faces is thereby apparent in the novel as well. These findings show the importance of metafiction within literary studies, as an innovative and transparent tool to better understand fiction and its relationship to reality.