With its laser-focus on the verbal and visual infrastructure of narrative, _The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors _is the first sustained comparative study of how image patterns are tracked in prose and cinema. In film examples ranging from _Citizen Kane_ through_ Apocalypse Now_ to _Blade Runner 2049_, then on to Christopher Nolan's 2020 _Tenet_, Garrett Stewart follows the shift from celluloid to digital cinema through various narrative manifestations of the image, from freeze-frames to computer-generated special effects. By bringing cinema alongside literature, Stewart discovers a common tendency in contemporary storytelling, in both prose and visual narrative, from the ongoing trend of “mind-game” films to the often puzzling narrative eccentricities of such different writers as Nicholson Baker and Richard Powers-including the latter's eerie mirroring of reader empathy in his 2021 _Bewilderment._