This dissertation explores the construction of human identity and reality through texts that question generic parameters and ponder the ambiguous limits between reality and fiction. In contemporary Spanish literature one finds difficult-to-classify texts that straddle traditional literary genres and require the invention of new categories such as the autobiographical metafiction. This generic hybridity and the use of metafiction serve as narrative tools to contemplate the fictional nature of human identity.

In the first chapter, I review Miguel de Unamuno's ideas about auto/biography as proposed in Cómo se hace una novela (1927) in order to introduce concepts that will be fundamental to my later analysis. Specifically, Unamuno dissects the relationship between autobiography and life; novel and writing; and author, character and reader. I use Gonzalo Navajas' canonical work Unamuno desde la posmodernidad: Antinomia y síntesis ontológica (1992) in which he studies Unamuno from a post-structuralist perspective and demonstrates that there are important similarities between Unamuno's thought and that of critics such as Derrida or De Man. Like these deconstructionist critics, he does not believe that the world has definite structure or meaning. Cómo se hace una novela is fundamentally about the fictionalization or textualization of reality, demonstrating that since no objective reality exists, each subject may create their own. As such, the distinction between reality and fiction disappears.

In the next three chapters, I analyze the works of three Spanish authors that have not yet received in-depth critical attention, and that employ auto/biography as a genre or theme: Juan José Millás' Dos mujeres en Praga (2002), Rosa Montero's La loca de la casa (2003) and Enrique Vila-Matas' París no se acaba nunca (2003). These unamunian ideas are relevant since they redefine the genre and pose the problematic representation of the self taken up by more recent Spanish authors. Through the auto/biographical trope I explore how these texts assert that the notion of identity and reality as independent of language is questionable and that the only manner of existing, of being, is through writing.