The Long, Long Way: Young Children Explore the Fabula and Syuzhet of Shortcut

In the picture book Shortcut (1995), the mediated telling of the fabula (the story) by David Macaulay results in a nonlinear and nonsequential syuzhet (the plot). Several metafictive devices used in the construction of the syuzhet of Shortcut draw attention to its status as text and fiction. Although researchers and theorists have written about metafiction, there is a lack of research that has explored students' literary understandings of and responses to books with metafictive characteristics. As well as defining metafiction and identifying various metafictive devices described in the literature, this article discusses young children's responses to and understandings of some of the metafictive devices in Shortcut.