These questions remain unanswered in the novel and suggest fluidity between the roles of author, reader, and critic. The Typing Ghost and Caroline share the role of author within the narrative, and it is unclear which belongs to a more authoritative framed narrative due to the ambiguity of the novel's ending. Caroline also fills the role of reader, listening to the narration recited by the Typing Ghost, and takes on the role of critic “making exasperating remarks [that] continued to interfere with the book” (161). In this way the roles of author, reader and critic are carried out by multiple characters, thus 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 suspect figure, the role of the reader must change accordingly. The reader is invited, required, to become a sort of investigative figure, trying to make sense of the inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions in the narrative (123). Although Nicol merely comments on the author as an unreliable figure, his observations can also be applied to the roles of reader and critic, whose provisionality as literary conventions is foregrounded by the self-reflexivity of metacommentary. The narrative frames, 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 various author characters are undermined by Ermes Marana, a translator who spreads false translations of books to fulfill h...... middle of paper ......arsava defines Traveler as “a novel that 'forces the reader to 'be the author'" (Watts 710). Perhaps then, this tension can be resolved by recognizing that loci 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 their metacommentary. As Madeleine Sorapure argues, Traveler places “the author on the same level as the reader” (704) and “the plurality and complexity of detail in the text reacts against the totalizing efforts of the Male Reader or literary critic to subsume these disruptive and influencing elements into a clean and orderly whole” (707). Sorapure's observation can also be applied to the other two texts and to other "meta" fictions that represent structures and conventions of authority and at the same time question them.