The Dynamic Unity of Reality and Fictionality based upon the Unnatural Narratives in <i>Once Upon a Time</i>

Abstract

Created by John Barth in the mid-to-late period of his life, Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (hereinafter referred to as Once Upon a Time) is one of Barth’s significant novels which explore various possibilities of literary creation. Once Upon a Time was claimed as “a memoir bottled in a novel” by its author, and the reality and fictionality intertwined by recourse to unusual narrative techniques which are probably unfamiliar to readers who are accustomed to read realistic works. In order to make clearer sense of the ways the author utilizes to achieve the dynamic unity of the reality and fictionality in the novel, this article employs theories of unnatural narratology to illustrate those unusual narratives on the basis of close reading of the literary text of the novel. On the ground of the analyses of the interaction between reality and fictionality based upon unnatural narratives, such as the unusual genre, the multiple identities of “I”, and the temporal loop, this article concludes that factuality and fictionality or life and art are complementary to each other, as the author of the novel describes that they are “coaxial esemplasy”.