Postmodern Metafiction: A Study of McCormick’s Sold

Abstract

Patricia McCormick’s Sold is a story of Lakshmi,a poor girl from rural Nepal, in the form of a series of vignettes weaved on the basis of her own research on Nepali girls trafficking and selling of girls to brothels in India for sexual slavery.Poverty- stricken Nepali girl Laksmi is sold to the brothel in Calcutta where she suffered a lot due to the intolerable extreme sexual exploitation of customers in the brothel. McCormick has weaved the story of Lakshmi on the basis of her own research in the form of a number of vignettes in order to show Lakshmi’s fragmented life story. Therefore, it is a blending of fact and fiction and hence a metafiction. Sold has postmodern metafictional tenets:self-reflexivity and circularity of narrative, intertexuality and in disciplinarity of text, interaction between fact and fiction,and indeterminacy of meaning and open-endedness to the story.McCormick has written Sold in the form of postmodern metafiction in order to show the fragmented life story of Lakshmi due to patriarchal, poverty-stricken,and utilitarian society of rural Nepal as well as document the pathetic story of sexual violation of Nepali poor innocent girls and to give voice to the suffered ones who are sold in brothels of foreign countries for sex workers.In this way,McCormick’s Soldis a postmodern metafiction.