Abstract
Robert Gipe’s novel Trampoline meets Roland Barthes’s criteria for a modern novel because of its surprising use of a graphic form and a storyteller’s (or oral history) point of view that transcends the barrier between reader and narrator. It achieves these aims by its use of the surreal, placing it, in a uniquely Appalachian way, in the tradition of magical realism. Its use (or misuse) of magical realism is integral to its Appalachian identity, since magical realism is a form associated with cultures, like Appalachian, that have been abused by outside colonizing forces and corrupt government systems. This “oral history” novel’s breakdown of the fourth wall of fiction—point of view—contributes to this unsettling and pushes the form as well as the substance to reflect an unsettling of assumptions, an unsettling that is appropriate given the social and environmental devastation wrought by the extractive resource industry in Appalachia.
