Deconstruction and Reconstruction: Metafictional Strategies and the Critique of Authoritative Narratives in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Abstract

This article analyzes Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit from a narratological perspective, focusing on its metafictional critique of authoritative narratives. Drawing on Patricia Waugh’s theory of metafiction, it argues that the novel challenges conventional coming-of-age narratives through self-reflexivity and narrative experimentation. By foregrounding the fictionality of narrative, Winterson exposes how religious, gendered, and historical discourses construct alternative realities while claiming narrative authority. The novel’s rejection of realist transparency, achieved through non-omniscient narration, narrative fragmentation, and direct authorial intervention, destabilizes fixed meanings, and invites readers to reflect on the nature of storytelling itself. Intertextual rewritings further undermine dominant narrative frameworks by revealing their dependence on convention. Ultimately, the novel reconstructs narrative as an open discursive space in which meaning is contingent, plural, and resistant to singular authority.