Children’s Metafiction, Readers, and Reading: Building Thematic Models of Narrative Comprehension

Gustavson (Gustavson, L., Journal of Children’s Literature, 2000, 26(1), 16) used the award-winning novel The View From Saturday (Konigsburg, 1996) to investigate the discourses constructed by adolescent readers in after-school discussion groups. Participants in his study, instead of constructing interpretive discourse as Gustavson expected, constructed descriptive discourse and mostly focused on themselves as readers. Metafictional, multiperspectival novels like The View From Saturday challenge readers’ understandings of what a novel is and how it operates. Children’s metafiction offers rich potential for thematic exploration, but in order to tap this rich resource readers need tools to help them make meaning. A thematic model of narrative comprehension, derived from the constructionist and event-indexing models of narrative comprehension, is a tool which makes metafictional narrative accessible to readers and expands readers’ capacity to construct interpretive discourse.