Theatre Novel: Joseph Scapellato’s THE MADE-UP MAN
This essay is a critical exploration of Joseph Scapellato’s novel The Made-Up Man, analyzing how its form and structure create a metafictional, performative experience that interrogates ideas of agency, authorship, and identity. Mike Corrao uses themes from The Made-Up Man to illustrate how form shapes content, how characters become prisoners of narrative, and how readers are drawn into a theatrical exercise of control, compliance, and existential questioning. This meta-fictional novel doesn't just tell a story, it enacts the limitations of storytelling itself.