Self-Representation in Fiction: The Use of Author Characters from Inclusion to Puppetry

This dissertation identifies a previously unarticulated literary device, authorial self-representation in fiction, and examines three authors who, in the last two decades, have published novels with representations of themselves as characters. While authors have always appeared as narrators in the genre of life-writing, their appearance within fiction has until recently been a much rarer phenomenon. Like readers, authors are not fictional creations, and so are not expected to exist within their novels; yet, by rendering themselves as a named character within their fiction, authors violate literary convention and create opportunities for them to converse with and be acted upon by their fictional subjects. Although the figure of the author has been much theorized in the last half-century, such scrutiny has focused on their role in literary production and reception, rather than the narratological and agential consequences of their appearance as characters within fiction. Explicitly addressing that gap in scholarship, this dissertation examines texts from three authors—white Afrikaner Australian J. M. Coetzee, first-generation Chicano immigrant Salvador Plascencia, and half-Japanese half-“Caucasian-American” Ruth Ozeki—who have deployed self-representation in their recent novels and proposes a theory of how and to what end this solidifying literary device is being used, especially in works that are post-colonial in nature. I argue that it is no coincidence self-representation is being pioneered by authors who occupy hybrid positionalities in the identity-obsessed literatures of white settler states, and that self-representation offers these authors a post-colonial strategy for proleptically addressing identitarian pressures. This dissertation further argues that self-representation allows for the apparent expansion of a novel’s scope and stakes, either working to reinforce the novel’s fictional events and characters through what I call self-inclusion or to cheapen them through what I call self-puppetry. By drawing from theories adjacent to these concerns, ranging from chronological suspense to psychological interiority and from authorial confession to the act of reading, and by applying them to novels like Diary of a Bad Year (2007), The People of Paper (2005), and A Tale for the Time Being (2013), this dissertation establishes a theoretical foundation and methodology for studying this growing literary trend.

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