A Heart Breaking Work Of Staggering Genius Analysis

Dave Egger’s memoir, A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, takes a bold plunge into experimental literary techniques. His story of raising his kid brother, Toph, after the death of their parents is crafted at a new and unique level of post-modernism. This interplay that Eggers creates between his text and the audience became the model of joint attention and the double-audience position in the article “Affect and artifice in cognitive literary theory”, by Merja Polvinen. Polvinen argues in the article that the author’s, Eggers, commentary on, the narrator’s, Dave, actions does not remove the reader, and thus their empathy, from the situation, but allows for them to take in both worlds simultaneously, and create emotional reactions to
She is quick to counter this idea stating that the act of “separating emotionally immersed and reflectively rational ways of experiencing fiction…might be hampering our understanding of the experience of fiction” (167). She argues that the audience is capable of a double position, in which the author creates by introducing the environment of “joint-attention”. Joint-attention allows for the reader to be aware of a situation, and be aware that the author is also aware of the situation (167). The use of joint-attention can be seen by Eggers throughout A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in which Eggers often breaks in, as the author, to comment on the situations of Dave, the narrator. Specifically, when Eggers begins to write Dave’s response to the ever looming question of where their parents are as a script, he draws the reader’s attention to Dave’s situation, and also to the fact that Eggers is aware of the situation as the author. By creating it in this script style, the reader feels empathy for Dave, and how he has been put in this situation, but also, this empathy is intensified when they realize that Eggers has responded to this question so many times that his answers feel scripted to him, even
Metafiction allows for the author to disclose to the reader his/her experience of writing that portion of the text, while still focusing in on the present narrator. It is a “culmination of the complex mixture of artificially inflated description and genuine emotion” (176). In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave and Toph are having a conversation about what they did that day, that turns into a discussion on the morals of Dave. However, the discussion is no longer one between Dave and Toph, but Dave and Eggers. This use of fictionalizing a conversation in the work allows for the reader to see how much of a therapeutic tool the memoir was for Eggers. It allowed him to reflect and question who he was, and showcased to the reader that Eggers did not just get stuck in the process of figuring out his moral downfalls, but is now able to recognize them, and call them out in his past self. This growth witnessed by the reader allows for them to see and feel the struggle of Dave as he tries to figure it out, and the pride in knowing that Eggers has. Polvinen’s argument that the use of metafiction intensifies the experience for the reader is upheld by Eggers execution of it, that produces a multi-layer emotional tie, and multi-dimensional involvement for the