Inescapable contextuality: Functions of metafictional paradox in 'Tristram Shandy' and 'At Swim-Two-Birds' (Laurence Sterne, Flann O'Brien, Ireland)

The idea that Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century mock-autobiography Tristram Shandy typifies some of the narrative techniques and philosophies of the twentieth-century postmodern art movement is hardly a novel one. What has not been explored fully enough is Sterne's ideological connection with Flann O'Brien, author of the metafictional narrative At Swim-Two-Birds . The main narrators of both novels (those which the narratives are framed around) are self-referential and at the same time topical where circumstance is concerned. With both there is a concern with artistic and narrative acts. This is not to say that either Sterne or O'Brien should be given full credit for the "invention" of metafictional narrative technique, but that each was an innovative artist within the context of his time. What results, however, is the metafictional paradox, that the created narrators are at once aware of their position relative to their creator's but are also incapable of escaping it.