A character in a novel who recognizes that he is a character in a novel

Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language has a really great postmodern moment (p. 247) in which the hapless philosophy professor, Simon Herzog, whom the French police inspector Bayard has pulled from his academic setting and made him an advisor and sidekick in the search for the eponymous document that various spies and other operatives have been seeking for means fair and foul, including possibly the assassination of the one who composed the document, Roland Barthes. At this point in the novel, with Herzog and pretty much everyone else completely befuddled by the tangle of events - and we still don't know why this document is so important to anyone aside from the French intellectuals and their coteries - Herzog takes stock of his life. He realizes that he has had more adventures and strange encounters in the past few weeks than he'd expected to have over the course of his life: To name just a few, he's had sex in an Italian piazza, had witness a couple engaged in sex on a photocopying machine, had seen a man stabbed to death with a poisoned umbrella, had been involved in a car chase across Paris ending when the pursuers tried to kill him, etc. Then he tries to make sense of the adventure he's been brought into, and he goes over in his mind a # of the shaggy plot points that bother attentive readers as well, or this and of numerous other adventure novels: Why, for example, didn't the Prime Minister just have the suspect (a female Bulgarian philosopher) brought in for interrogation rather than send Bayard and Herzog to a conference in the U.S. to spy on her?, etc. At last he says: I think I'm stuck in the middle of a novel! Great: That's a sentence that calls attention to itself in so many ways. Yes, he is a character in a novel, so in addressing that fact he utters a true statement. But then again, even his recognition of his status as a "character in a novel" is suspect: Words are things, too, but what is the reference point here? Who is making this observation? A character? An author? We, the readers? Narrators often step outside of their own narrative to address the reader; characters, rarely so - and even when seeming to do so they remain characters. In a sense, Herzog's feeling of being a character in a novel is something we readers may also feel from time to time: My life is so complicated right now it should be a novel - who hasn't thought that? In some ways, Herzog's utterance is "within character," that is, just a realistic/naturalistic moment in this dizzying narrative.
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