Swift’s ‘Waterland’ has been classified as “explicit historiographic metafiction” because of its complexly self-reflexive representation of history and historiography and related epistemological and ontological issues. This definition will serve as a basis for showing that three mutually exclusive concepts of historiography are unfolded in the novel: reconstructive, constructive, and deconstructive historiography. The narrator, Tom Crick, relates three distinct chains of narrative: the history of his family, spanning many decades, his childhood in the 1940s and finally his life as an ageing teacher in the present. These narrative threads are intertwined in intricate ways by means of recurrent motifs and cross-references. The narrative structure is thus semantically charged with meaning by means of its achronological and circular arrangement. The reader has to carefully reconstruct the chronological sequence of events from the achronological order of the discourse. Thus, like the historian, the reader must assemble apparently heterogenous material to form a coherent structure.