“(No) Face to Himself, Many Others to the Multitude”: Poetics & Ethics of the Mask Trope in American Metafiction

This article examines the play of the mask trope in two American metafictional narratives in order to explore the interconnectedness of the problematization of the character concept and the satirizing of American postwar culture. Through a reading of Second Skin (1964) by John Hawkes and Mother Night (1961) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the paradoxical operation of confessional storytelling, performed in both texts as role-playing, will be assimilated to a questioning of the borderline between person and persona. The mode of parody in both texts will be shown to subvert the category of the “personification mask” by altering the conventional pattern of typification in character portrayal, while the heightened theatricality displayed in the performance of the two first-person narrators will be linked to the play of the carnivalesque effect, which brings forward the operation of the ‘impersonation mask.” Connecting the play of these literary masks to the satiric impulse of American metafiction, I will then argue that the deliberate flaunting of the artifice of characterization induces a polemicising of the ontological status of literary character at the same time as it contributes to the satirizing of the imperialist ethos of the Robinsonade tradition (Second Skin) or also the American Establishment and popular mass media (Mother Night).