The book ends with the protagonist writing the book you're reading

>The book ends with the protagonist writing the book you're reading
>mfw

>The first episode is a letter found in a bottle

>The book has a framing structure to explain how it got published as a fiction book even though it's supposed to have actually happened

>the book ends with a rocket hitting the reader

> the first book is mentioned to be a book in the second book

>the book begins with the protagonist writing the book you're reading

I kinda want to do that with my book.

>The book begins with the villain explaining the ending
SPOILETS

>The book carries the namesake of a book that appears in the story

>the author forgot to include a preface before the book started and when he does remember he's forgotten a preface he puts it right then and there in the middle of the book

The protagonist and narrator dies on the last page but still managed to write the story in a novel?

Are these cringey? I want to do them to a degree but they seem cringey

yes
all of it has been done before and being heavy-handedly metafictional can often turn great stories into shit
its the reason Barth isn't praised anywhere near as much as he used to be

That would just piss me off. I intentionally skip prefaces.

I mean the former rather than "Haha so I published this book"
It's more as a framing device. Something that comes across as simply a first person story, written after the fact and the "revelation" being that it's being recorder for a purpose. (A sort of combination will/official report)
I've just always felt that first person narratives lack any real mortal tension as if they died the book would simply end mid-sentence.

>mfw the Alexandria quartet fit all of these

>simply end mid-sentence
Read don quixote

Not quite what I mean.
The entire book is a retrospective on a series of events on the protagonists life from the protagonist, but in the end he winds up working with a group that essentially require an official report/documentation of said events, with the book being said documentation. An autobiography about a real time and place from a man who never actually existed.

>The entire book is a retrospective on a series of events on the protagonists life from the protagonist, but in the end he winds up working with a group that essentially require an official report/documentation of said events, with the book being said documentation.

First post on this thread. I kind of like that idea, desu. Presenting the story as an official report implies there will likely be a certain level of unreliable narration. Which could be interesting, all other things being equal.

ps: mild cringe. this stupid board turned my 't b h' into 'desu'

>the book has a homosexual demon trapped inside of it, telling you not to read it

It's probably been done, but a book with a final twist that any person who reads it is cursed by it would be a decent twist.

'Tis merely a reply.

This fucked me up for a while when I read David Copperfield as a kid.

pls mommy nooo

>The whole thing was in protagonists's head but his choices still affected the real world

This fucked me up on a psychological level.

>The book spends several chapters justifying pedophilic gay sex with boys, as the highest and most pure form of romantic relationships.
>MFW THIS IS A FUCKING CLASSIC BOOK OF GREAT RESPECT
>MFW I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO FEEL ANYMORE
>Mfw wondering if Plato was right....

Any good examples that aren't ruined automatically by knowing that it's the case? As a fan of good and shit horror vidya I've seen this a billion times and rarely done well.

Why was this reported/deleted? That was a post relevant to the thread. Which rule says "You musn't reference chainmail"?

Plato didn't argue that; Plato spoke through Socrates (and in the Symposium, Diotima). Socrates refutes this idea as a lower, more base conception of love and not the one which corresponds to the ideal.

I'm torn on how upfront to be about it. On one hand if it's upfront as you say it's a good reason for unreliable narration and honestly helps with the writing since any of my autistic bleep boop human emotions are hard syndrome will just come across as a weary, shamed man not being particularly good at expressing how he felt about at least one particularly horrific situation. On the other hand it tips the hand in revealing he ends up working for an organisation and sharing the information, which would raise eyebrows a bit early when weird/impossible things start happening

>mfw I was faking it and never read the book.

>the book begins with the protagonist reading the book you're writing
Bricks were shat

>and honestly helps with the writing since any of my autistic bleep boop human emotions are hard syndrome will just come across as a weary, shamed man not being particularly good at expressing how he felt about at least one particularly horrific situation.

That's a pretty good reason to use the form. Not necessarily a dispositive reason, but a pretty good reason.

>On the other hand it tips the hand in revealing he ends up working for an organisation and sharing the information, which would raise eyebrows a bit early when weird/impossible things start happening

I dunno. When you adopt a particular form there's a cost/benefit to it. I guess you just have to make a judgment call whether you can make the story you want to tell work using a 'report' form.

steppenwolf

I'll find a middleground no doubt, or simply write as much as I can both ways and pick the one that feels right, or post in a critique thread. If it can come across naturally without handholding or throwing out basic book structure I certainly want to make it work

Well meme'd, sir.

>when the book is written as the author slowly goes insane, but is written backwards, so that the end is comprehensive due to vague pre-planning structure, and as the chapters regress the author loses control over the end product, and the novel gets more and more disjointed, and the novel starts with an authors note, vague on its inception period, which directly states that all books that will ever be written afterwards are of little importance and should simply be burned for warmth. There is already enough junk out there, just don't bother wasting your life as a fraud telling stories you've never believed.
>mfw it was a marketing ploy for the editor who is also the author, but has hidden this fact from the public so as to boast that he can make sense of a madman
>mfw the editor shoots himself in the head when the investigative journalism requires the editor to pretend to be the crazy author, in an attempt to convince the public that the author is real, and was once of sane mind, otherwise the stories are simply ravings and not a work of post-modern genius, with a little reference to the man who lied on oprah that one time
>mfw the investigative journalist dissappears
>mfw the editor's body dissappears
>mfw the entire story of it being a fraud was the author pretending to be an editor pretending to be a crazy author, who killed the journalist to create more drama around the story, to cement the writers place among the greats
>mfw the book has three matches hidden at the end, instructing the reader to burn the book immediately and recommend the book to a friend at the same time

name 1 (one) book

>The storyline is a series of books written by three different authors in an attempt to hide the truth

What are some good examples of this?
I was supposed to infer that this is what was happened at the end of Cat's Cradle right?

The outsider's does this.
Gatsby does this.
To a real degree hp Lovecraft does this.
A lot of try hards do this.

Lovecraft's works are usually written as if they were by the character rather than a reveal. Dagon opens with pretty much "Please don't think I'm mad"

Notes from Underground - Dostojevskij
Lolita - Nabokov
Pale Fire (?) - Nabokov

This was standard practice for centuries. Why do none of you know that?

This is what I get for listening to audio books while running.
I'll have to read them again because I got it wrong.

Probably worth it. I love Lovecraft and I have to shake my eyes and reread a page now again.

>Now and again
Fuck

>it's non-fiction

That only happened once to me when my sister gave a me a book that I thought sucked.
Funny enough when I found out it was memoir it became a 100x better.

>It's about a man in a time loop but it's a about a time-travelling woman but it's a book written by the man but he is dead but he is also alive but it's all in the woman's head but the reality itself is a book written by an entirely different author

>the book ends with the protagonist reading the book you're reading

>The book's ending is the beginning of the plot

>the narrator begins the story from the middle only to jump into a long retrospection immediately

Stop, record scratch, "you might be wondering what I'm doing here"

>book is a fictional autobiography of a real historical figure

>the book ends with a polarimetric birefringence of the main character into two separate anisotropic beings

I think la peste by camus did this. Someome saying lolita is pretty dumb since its clear the entire time that h humbert is writing the book. Lol spoilers btw

yeah, james and the giant peach was the last book i read too

What are some books that actually do this?

>protagonist is writing down the story
>uses caps and exclamation marks and jumps out of a window while still writing

Fucked you up as in? Good bad

This is why I refuse to read most series
Always this same shit that makes me feel I wasted time reading the book

The Pale King?

What about Master and Margerita? Protagonist had written a book BEFORE the story is finished. Prot writing a book in the end of the story is cliche af.

>The events from the book really happened except they didn't but they really did

>tfw the book is a book

The Eisenhorn trilogy by Dan Abnett does this. It's genre fiction, but he pulls it off well. Read it for inspiration if that's your bag.

It's Warhammer 40k, so be aware. Though it's much more mundane than normal 40k shenanigans.

>the main character is an author who is writing a book where the main character is the author who is writing a book where the

>preface has spoilers
>book also has introduction

would read again

>The book is a hyperbolic allegory to the changing times the author lived through.
Early 20th century was one hell of a ride.

>The book opens with some ambiguous pseudo-dialog loosely connected to the coming chapters
>Continues to drop seemingly random lines in intermissions
>Its actually the thoughts of the character before his demise and the whole story is just a recollection of his memories.

Nothing wrong with these.

Borges and Nabokov sort of do that

What is the Bible?

Death in Venice or Steppenwolf?

>reality is an illusion but the higher reality is also an illusion

>grouchy hard-boiled detective story has gruff 1st person narration
>narrator turns out to be the villain

Don Quixote does this perfectly

The Pale King did it too yes but it was Tristam Shandy