Fuzzy illusions: reality and the subject in Eric Kraft's "Call me Larry".

In much contemporary fiction, the questioning of our inherited notions of the subject as an autonomous, unified individual, and reality as the clearly recognisable world in which we live has resulted in many cases in the disappearance of plot in its Aristotelian conception: as the first and most important dramatic element in the novel in this case. However, some contemporary American writers choose to recuperate a realistic mode of storytelling, a realism which is nevertheless postmodernist for its preoccupation with language and its questioning of reality and the subject. This «postmodern realism- would be said to be the mode in which the whole of Eric Kraft's work has been conceived. In «Cali Me Larry-, one of the novellas that make Little Follies (1992), the boundaries between the three ontologies where the three authors belong -the «real» Eric Kraft, and the two fictional authors, Peter Leroy and Roger Drake-, and even the figures of the three authors themselves, are craftily blurred, only to be re-constructed for the sake of the story, inviting the reader to suspend his/her disbelief and enjoy storytelling