METANARRATIVES AND TEXTUAL IRONIES IN ROBERT KROETSCH'S GONE INDIAN UDC 820(71).09-31

Abstract. The narrative structure of Robert Kroetsch's novel Gone Indian is multi-layered and abounds in the use of mythological fragments with special reference to the myths and stories of the Canadian past and present. Robert Kroetsch's use of myth in his novels, as well as in the novel Gone Indian, is exposed to parody and irony for he believes that familiar myths and stories must be "deconstructed", "uninvented " and "unnamed " (all his favored terms) as fictions. The surface story of the novel Gone Indian is concerned with the issues of identity of the main hero Jeremy Sadness whose life story, recorded in fragments on the tape re-corder, is manipulated and interpreted by another narrative voice in the novel, Jeremy's professor and supervisor, Mark Madham, who plays the role of a parodic reader-surrogate and writer-surrogate. What is of interest here is not the overt structure and content of the narrative, but the covert structures, hidden in "the space between ' the text and the actual reader. Three of the most significant texts beneath the surface story of Gone Indian are: Frederick Jackson Turner's notion of the American frontier; the story of "Gray Owl", a type of an ironic trickster figure in the text; and Jack Shadbolt's mural at the Edmonto