"And That's Immortality": Metafiction and the Importance of Contexts and Co-texts in Neil Gaiman's Short Stories
(2018) Journal of the Short Story in English — Vol. 71, n° 1, p. 107-130 (2018)
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- While Neil Gaiman’s stories can easily be enjoyed as isolated objects, his explicit inclusion in a contemporary literary field promoting transmedial strategies encourages his readers to pay particular attention to the different contexts and co-texts of his short stories when both reading and interpreting them. In this paper, I will show how the recurrent metafictional aspect of Gaiman’s work, which appears quite explicitly in many of his texts, truly culminates in a celebration of stories and storytelling when their multiple contexts are taken into account. The discussion will more specifically focus on “Feeders and Eaters” (1990) and “Troll Bridge” (1993), two short stories which both explore their metafictional potential through the metaphor of a desacralisation of human immortality. We will see how taking the context of these stories into account allows one to move from a metafictional comment on the singular (the authenticity or the repetition of a particular story) to a metafictional comment on a much more symbolic level (the immortality of stories as discarnate objects, and of storytelling as an essential human act).
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Geuzaine, F. (2018). “And That’s Immortality”: Metafiction and the Importance of Contexts and Co-texts in Neil Gaiman’s Short Stories. Journal of the Short Story in English, 71(1), 107-130. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269293 (Original work published 2018)