These questions remain unanswered in the novel and suggest the fluidity between the roles of author, reader, and critic. The Typing Ghost and Caroline share the authorial role in the narrative, and it is unclear which one belongs to a more authoritarian framing narrative due to the ambiguity of the novel's ending. Caroline also straddles the role of reader, listening to the narrative recited by Typing Ghost, and takes on the role of critic "making infuriating remarks [that] continued to interfere with the book" (161). In this way, the roles of author, reader, and critic are filled by multiple characters, thereby decentralizing the authority and autonomy of each individual role. By decentralizing the notion of authorship, Nicol suggests that Spark generates a complementary model of reading. Once the author becomes a suspicious character, the reader's role must then change accordingly. The reader is invited, forced, to become a kind of detective character, trying to make sense of the inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions in the narrative (123). While Nicol only sees the author as an unreliable character, his observations can apply equally to the roles of reader and critic, whose provisional character as literary conventions is brought to the fore by the self-reflexivity of metacommentary . The framing narratives, which seem unproblematic at the beginning of the text, gradually intersect in a way that escapes the neat closure of a “Russian doll” hierarchy of authority. Another example of the fluidity of author-reader-critic roles occurs in Traveler, where the identities of the author's various characters are undermined by Ermes Marana, a translator who distributes false translations of books in order to fill his...... middle of paper ......arsava calls Traveler "a novel that 'requires the reader to 'play the author'" (Watts 710). Perhaps then this tension can be resolved by recognizing that sites of authority and autonomy continually shift in "meta-fictions" as their self-reflexive nature invites the reader to participate in the text while simultaneously asserting critical authority in its meta-commentary. As Madeleine Sorapure argues, The Traveler places "the author on the same level as the reader" (p. 704) and "the plurality and complexity of the details of the text react against the totalizing efforts of the reader or literary critic to encompass these disruptive phenomena and affecting the elements in a neat and ordered whole” (707). Sorapure's observation also applies to the two other texts and other “meta” fictions which represent structures and conventions of authority at the same time as they call them into question...