Abstract
Fred Chappell's I Am One of You Forever is largely a novel about storytelling. There are three characters who especially figure into this theme: Jess Kirkman (the narrator), Joe Robert (his father) and Uncle Zeno (from his mother’s side), all of whom tell many tales. As a result of these disparate storytellers, there is also a strong current of metafiction running within this novel. This essay examines how metafiction, and storytelling—especially in regards to Uncle Zeno—address and more importantly, dispel, stereotypes about Appalachian stories and Appalachia as a whole: in short, it contends that Chappell uses metafiction to re-write commonly accepted narratives about Appalachia. Many of these stereotypes were a product of the Local Color fiction tradition of the late 19th and early 20th century, and Chappell's inclusion of Zeno in the novel serves as a way of getting rid of stereotypes, and as a model for how Appalachian stories should instead be told.
How to Cite
Rogers, J., (2016) “Narrative Disruption: Metafiction in Fred Chappell's I Am One of You Forever”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 29(1).
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