@article{article_1734079, title={The Death of the Author, the Birth of Ethics: Metafiction and Narrative Ontology in Stranger Than Fiction}, journal={SineFilozofi}, pages={16–32}, year={2025}, DOI={10.31122/sinefilozofi.1734079}, author={Sarıbaş, Serap}, keywords={Matafiction, Anlatı Ontolojisi, Yazar İşlevi, Anlatı Etiği, Seyirci Bedenlemesi}, abstract={This study offers a layered analysis of the film Stranger Than Fiction (2006) within the framework of poststructuralist narrative theory by examining the author–text relationship, the formation of narrative subjectivity, and the representation of ethical responsibility. Roland Barthes’s conceptualization of the “death of the author” and Michel Foucault’s discursive model of the “author function” establish the film’s structural foundations, while Linda Hutcheon’s theory of metafiction resonates with its recursive aesthetic reflexivity. As Harold Crick’s life, condemned to ordinariness, is disrupted by the intrusion of an external narrative voice, the character undergoes a shift from being a textual object to becoming a self-aware subject within the narrative. The film not only blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality but also makes visible the ethical and ontological weight of storytelling. By reading and accepting his own textual death, and through the author’s subsequent reversal of this ending, the narrative shifts from monologic authority to a dialogic ethical configuration. The spectator is no longer a passive observer outside the narrative but becomes an agent who witnesses its internal ethical architecture and engages with it affectively. The film’s visual composition, use of voice, and embodiment of the cinematic body compel the viewer to form an ontological and sensory bond with the text. In this regard, Stranger Than Fiction not only materializes the theoretical paradigms of Barthes, Foucault, and Hutcheon but also serves as an original and multilayered instance of film-philosophy, inviting a rethinking of the ontological status and moral potentials of narrative itself.}, number={2025 10. Yıl Özel Sayısı}, publisher={Serdar ÖZTÜRK}