Nonfiction and Fiction in Disguise

Abstract

How can a reader tell that a work is nonfiction? Even those who study it concede the difficulty: factual narrative actually is referential, or factual narrative claims to be referential and truthful (Schaeffer). Most readers know that the nonfiction narrative in their hands qualifies as nonfiction because it bears a label associated with a nonfiction genre. The book may have been acquired from the nonfiction section of a bookstore, where works of history, biography, or autobiography sit on shelves across the aisle from the various subgenres of fiction. The work may have come to the attention of a reader through a list: New York Times bestsellers receive separate notice in Fiction and Nonfiction listings. The book itself may bear a label, a paratextual indicator of its category. Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 story of Louie Zamperini, an Olympic runner who became a prisoner of war after his airplane crashed in the Pacific, bears the paratextual label, ‘biography’ on its back cover. In the United States, the Library of Congress catalogues works of nonfiction as biographies, such as ‘Prisoners of war— United States— Biography,’ or as accounts of particular periods of history, such as ‘World War, 1939–1945— Aerial operations, American.’ Pragmatically speaking, labeling and categorizing performed by others shape most readers’ certainties about the nonfiction they read. This chapter discusses the powerful signs that Gerard Genette named ‘paratexts.’