Metafictional traitsMetanarrative traits are found in Flaubert's The Parrot and in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, before comparing them with the realism elements in The Moskat Family by Isaac Singer." For some, life is rich and creamy... while Art is a pale commercial package... For others, Art is the truest, fullest, most lively and emotionally satisfying thing, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, populated by bores and scoundrels, short of wit... and leading to a painfully predictable denouement."1 Thus Barnes compares life and art in Flaubert's Parrot; but these words could just as easily refer to the different perspectives of realist and metafictional writers. With these perspectives in mind, this essay will examine the metafictional traits found in Flaubert's Parrot and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, before comparing them with elements of realism in Isaac Singer's The Family Moskat. By considering the advantages and disadvantages of these novelistic schools of thought, it will then be demonstrated that the reader's views on life and art can determine the value one assigns to these alternative styles. When Braithwaite reflects, “If I were a dictator of fiction,”2 the very process of creating fiction becomes the object of narrative. Barnes himself is clearly a dictator in the sense that he has control over the content of his novel, but in this case Braithwaite is referring to all fiction. This reference to the production of narrative is a common quality of metafiction and occurs frequently in Flaubert's The Parrot. The theme is taken up again later, when Braithwaite says: "Many critics would like to be dictators of literature,... in the middle of the paper... out, for example, p. 87.19 Ibid., throughout, for example, p. 108.20 Ibid., p. 97.21 Ibid., p. 261.22 Ibid., p. 50-2.28 Ibid., p. 87.30 Ibid., p from Gross, AH, Penguin, London, 1980, p. 582.36 Ibid., p. 193.37 Ibid., p 132, 490, 543.41 See Barnes, p. 46.42 See Fowles, p , pp. 49-65.45 For example, Singer, pp. 239-242 (Letter from Adele to her mother), 444-52 (Hadassah's diary entries).46 Barnes, p.. 88.