The Ethics of (Reading) Metafiction: Revisiting Self-Reflexivity through Form in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and “Jumping Monkey Hill”

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and her short story “Jumping Monkey Hill” (2009) are both self-reflexive texts that feature writer figures as protagonists. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Ugwu, a houseboy, becomes the author of a book about the Biafran war that mirrors the reappropriation of African historiography in which Adichie’s novel itself participates, while in “Jumping Monkey Hill,” the female protagonist, Ujunwa, stands up to the racist and sexist organizer of the creative writers’ workshop that she has been attending. Both texts raise issues around writing and representation, and they also feature the common metafictional device of mise en abyme.
The self-reflexive aspects of these texts have elicited a range of critical responses, often reflecting scholars’ perceptions of the narratives’ ethical stance. Whereas “Jumping Monkey Hill” has been widely praised for its politics of postcolonial resistance, Half of a Yellow Sun has provoked more ambiguous reactions. Indeed, even if many commentators have celebrated the Nigerian writer-character’s reclaiming of the “single story” of Africa, dissonant voices have emphasized the novel’s potentially problematic gender-related views, mostly because the male writer figure, who becomes invested with symbolic authority over the narrative of Nigerian history, is also the (repentant) perpetrator of a wartime rape.
Throughout these discussions, only limited attention has been devoted to the narratives’ formal features, with the result that some key narratological and stylistic elements have tended to be overlooked, or indeed misread. As this paper will argue, casting a spotlight on such elements – including the use of free indirect speech and of lexical repetition – leads to a more layered reading emphasizing, for example, the parodic aspects of “Jumping Monkey Hill” and the approach to class found in Half of a Yellow Sun. Ultimately, beyond Adichie’s work, this analysis aims to show how form informs the politics of self-reflexivity (and vice-versa), but also how critical attention to formal textual components partakes of an ethical reading of metafiction.