What Exactly Does It Mean?

While reading Mitchell's work I realized that metapictures are, in a way, things that make us have epiphanies about anything. What I mean is that the Duck-Rabbit picture that was used in the text shows us a funny picture at first glance, but then the picture progressed into a psychological phenomenon that perhaps the artist did not intend. This idea of epiphany is absent with hypertext, even though both ideas include making connections through further thinking.

I may be confusing rhizomes and hypertext (maybe they are the same thing I do not know at this moment). That being said, rhizomes are a 'map that has no beginning or end.' By that sentence, the idea of rhizomes is essentially linear and has no depth in the sense that metapictures do.

Hypertext connects and is a web of intertwining works. Metapictures examine the relationship between the viewer, artist, and content. Las Meninas was the big example from the text and it described how one man in the picture was illustrated as another person in the household. What is the comment here? Is the artist providing some meaning? Why does he project that image in that way? Is he part of the upper-class or lower-class? This idea is reminiscent of Walter Ong and his relationship between the audience and reader. Only here, it is an artist.

Class and self-reflexivity in this text are addressed but I am still not completely sure what is said exactly. I immediately recall McCloud and his statement that "we put ourselves in everything." This is true regarding anything we make. Metapictures make those experiences and "self-awareness" known. The class in the Egyptian picture about the picture "show what they only knew" (43).