Vanderhaeghe's extensive use of violence and the grotesque is a way of examining disorder; presumably, his preoccupation with these elements implies a longing for disorder's opposite. Vanderhaeghe's notion of the hero in fiction is a pessimistic one; his characters' extreme self-awareness ironically plunges them into fictions, so that their stories become metalepses. Metalepsis is described as a complex ironic stance, in which the narrative itself suggests metafiction, while the characters within the narrative are literally lost in their own fictions. For example, in the novel My Present Age, the narrator becomes aware of being a fictional type with the reality of Kafka's protagonist.
