In Chemin-d’école and Demain j’aurai vingt ans, Patrick Chamoiseau and Alain Mabanckou both create an ambivalent character, reflecting on the author’s biography while presenting clear elements of fiction. This highlighting of the child’s artificiality is, according to Laurent Lepaludier, a foundation of metafiction. This article will analyze the metafictional function of the child-character in these novels, by showing that the child appears to represent the author in the text. The author uses the metatext to transform his character into a fictional recreation of himself. Both a reader and a writer, the child-character is also a mise en abyme of the author’s vision of literature, which he puts in practice in his text.