Dyer holds a Ph.D. in English literature and has published extensively on fiction, poetry, film, and television. He is also a freelance university teacher, writer, and educational consultant. In the following essay, he discusses Bender’s story as an example of metafiction, as a story that traces its own construction from the original moment of an idea through to a fully realized narrative complete with setting, plot, and characters.

Metafiction is a style of writing that draws attention to itself in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, as well as delighting in the nature of its own storytelling. In Aimee Bender’s “The Rememberer,” metafiction is a reflexive exercise that, like a funhouse mirror, allows readers to experience a “reverse evolution.” Aligned with such important antecedents as Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605) and Jane...