Summary: During the interwar and post-war period, Francesc Trabal was commited to renewing the realist-naturalist fiction pattern from a parodic-ironic perspective. Trabal's narrator undertakes to programmatically break up the rules of realist verisimilitude. The author does not cease to appear in the story, while the characters are able to leave it through the splendid use of a metalepsis. This paper shows how Trabal's novels achieve a unique appearance due to intertextual relationships (quotation, allusion and refer- ence), mentions of cinema techniques, the incorporation of historical characters in the fictional world, the narrator's transformation in an unreliable storytelling machine, the paratextual potential and the reciprocal invasion of both author's and characters' dominions by means of the metalepsis, which leads to metafictional practice and reflec- tion. [Keywords: Irony; parody; metafiction; narratology; narrator; author; history of the novel]