Illuminated manuscript : uses and effects of metafiction in Everything is illuminated

Abstract

This work examines the uses of metafiction within the novel Everything Is Illuminated, addressing specifically, at a subjective level, the effects of the novel’s different narrative levels on the reading experience. While this novel reproduces the opposition between reality and fiction within the narration of the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine with the aid of two narrators, I contend here that the structure of this novel creates a crisis of referentiality whose main purpose is to diminish the distance between the reader and the content narrated, entangling the reader’s level of reality into the maze of narrative voices in order to provide the reading experience with a double perspective – Jew and Gentile – on the effects of the memory of the Holocaust in the present of its narrators.