David Foster Wallace’s early novella Westward has been regularly read as the hinge-point between postmodernism and the third wave of modernism which succeeded it. Though this chapter begins from the same place it tells the story anew, taking Wallace’s coinage of ‘meatfiction’ as the origin of a wholly neglected trend in contemporary American fiction: a more morally horrified metafiction, with an eye to the cruel and industrialised treatment of animals. Writing in opposition to the great metafictionist John Barth, whose universe was profoundly shaped by developments in twentieth-century science, Wallace’s self-conscious literary patricide is an attempt to restore some order to the postmodern funhouse. Though several critics have noted that Wallace’s generation is marked by a new emphasis on generationality and embodiment, what this picture neglects, however, is Wallace’s place in a broader history of the novel and the Christian humanist tradition. Where postmodernism’s metafiction was the realism of a quantum and indeterminate universe, Wallace’s meatfiction sets the human being back in its place in the chain of being, somewhere below God and above the industrialised dead.