and the fictional bookworld. Ernest Hemingway's Natural History of the Dead uses a footnote to further satirize the style of a history while making a sardonic statement about the extinction of "humanists" in modern society. Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary follows each brief entry with a footnote (often five or six times the length of the main text) in which saints, historical figures, and other topics are used as examples for philosophical digression. The separate footnotes are designed to contradict each other, and only when multiple footnotes are read together is Bayle's core argument for Fideistic skepticism revealed. This technique was used in part to evade the harsh censorship of 17th-century France. Mordecai Richler's novel Barney's Version uses footnotes as a character device that highlights unreliable passages in the narration. As the editor of his father's autobiography, the narrator's son must correct any of his father's misstated facts. The frequency of these corrections increases as the father falls victim to both hubris and Alzheimer's disease. While most of these changes are minor, a few are essential to plot and character development. In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, the main plot is told through the annotative endnotes of a fictional editor. Bartleby y Compañía, a novel by Enrique Vila-Matas, is stylized as footnotes to a nonexistent novel. The works of Jack Vance often have footnotes, detailing and informing the reader of the background of the world in the novel. Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) uses both footnotes and margin notes to offer additional commentary and humor. Doug Dorst's novel S. uses footnotes to explore the story and relationship of characters V.M. Straka and F.X. Caldeira. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's collaboration, Good Omens, frequently uses footnotes to add humorous asides. See also Annotation Citation Hyperkino Ibid. Nota bene References Further reading Denton, William (2014). Fictional Footnotes and Indexes. Miskatonic University Press. Grafton, Anthony (1997). The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. . Zerby, Chuck (2002). The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bibliography Reference Metadata