Alasdair Gray fans should find this of interest. Here is a hand-out I made for a 2nd-year English Literature presentation I delivered on Poor Things. Each box represents a level of narrative authority, or a metafictional frame, each subordinated to the one which encloses it. The red lines represent brief shifts to a previous, higher authority (a pause and return to the narrative midway through the recitation of a letter, for example) or, if they do not extend out of the box, a brief shift into an even lower authority (such as a brief note written by a character that is ostensibly faithfully reproduced). Only the outermost layer represents our reality (that of Poor Things, a real book by the real Alasdair Gray) and everything beyond that is fictive, even if such ordinarily functional elements (author bio, real reviews, publication information) are contained within these fictional levels. It’s a very “metafictionally dense” book, full of verisimilitude but inviting interrogation of the text at every point. As you can see, the very last page (and I do mean the very last - that which is on the other side of the back cover) is still three layers of fictional narrative authority deep. In total, only four “pages” of the entire book (the two covers and the first two pages) do not contain fiction. Hope it’s not too difficult to see. Cheers!
