Postmodern Literature Tends to Use a Fragmented, Almost Collage-Like Style That Abandons Linear Chronology
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Postmodern literature tends to use a fragmented, almost collage-like style that abandons linear chronology. It presents the world as linguistically constructed and is suspicious of conventional ideas about “Truth” and reality, suggesting instead that we can only have multiple, fragmented truths. Because language is our only access to reality, postmodernism elevates language. Postmodern authors often use the technique of metafiction, commenting on the nature of storytelling as they tell the story and showing how language shapes reality. In a process called simulation, images sometimes come to see more real than reality itself. Postmodernism is also skeptical about the nature of individuality. Human beings, according to postmodern thinkers, may be mere social constructs or even machine-like beings, motivated by chemical reactions in the brain. This skepticism about individuality is often expressed through flat characters. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five provides a seminal example of postmodernism. He uses techniques of metafiction when he inserts an introductory chapter in which he lays out the premise of the novel and what it is not about. He tells us in the beginning how it begins and ends, what the climactic event is, and the outcome. The chronology of the novel is fragmented, destroying all suspense or conventional plot intrigue. As an example, we know that Edgar Derby is going to get shot for stealing a teapot long before it happens. Billy has come unstuck in time and lives the events of his life in an almost collage-like way, moving from the past to the future to the present unpredictably. Vonnegut also drastically limits character development in the novel. We really only get to know Billy, and even then not to the extent most novels would demand of their protagonist. And Billy is not really a full-fledged individual because he does not believe in free will. He invents his Tralfamadorian kidnapping to justify his own passivity. Vonnegut not only employs these techniques but also makes overt references to them. Before Edgar Derby's speech at Dresden, he tells us that "there are almost no characters in this book." In the latrine scene, Vonnegut points himself out: "That's me . .that's the author of this book." The end of Vonnegut's tricks is his theme: war reduces people; they become flat, "discouraged from being characters." We find no glamour or beauty in this book--we find only the events and the people and the plain, somber reality in which they exist. Vonnegut purposely writes a book about war with no parts for John Wayne or Frank Sinatra. Just as Vonnegut uses metafiction to question war and the absurdity of life, Don DeLillo uses metafiction to question the information society. The airplane incident, the airborne toxic event and the purpose of plots are all manifestations of metafiction in the novel. The power of the word to linguistically shape and determine the world is an idea carried out through the novel. Set up by Heinrich and his spiel on there being no past, present, or future without verbs, the ability to shape people's perceptions is made clear through language. The near airplane crash is an example of the shaping. Originally, at the first cry of danger, the loud speaker shakes with deadly news: "Crash." The cabin panics. As one stewardess gains control, the warning is manipulated and changed to "Crash landing." The mere addition of the word "landing" eases the fears of the falling people. Another example of the shaping of fears comes during the media reports of the airborne toxic event. What begins as a plume of smoke in the sky turns into the full blown toxic event. As the names of the dilemma worsen, the expectations and the fears of the people are heightened. Symptoms show up in people only after the radio announcements are made as to what to watch out for. DeLillo also deals with the idea of plots many times in the novel, indicative of metafiction because the novel itself talks about plots. The first section of the book, in fact, is plotless and Jack Gladney admits it: "Let the days be aimless." The book also is skeptical about individuality. The characters are not true individuals with free will, but like to play out the plots they have seen on television. Jack himself invents a plot for the killing of Mr. Mink. In fact, DeLillo suggests in White Noise that humans may be no more than “the sum total of their data,” as the SIMUVAC man tells Jack. Heinrich suggests humans are only neurological impulses firing in the brain, bundles of chemical reactions. People seem to simulate individualism rather than act as real individuals. Jack, for instance, changes his name, gains weight and becomes the “false character that follows the name around.” Simulations replace reality throughout the novel as well. The most-photographed barn is famous not because of the barn, but because it has been turned into an image. Characters feel that, without media coverage, their suffering means nothing. The real evacuation is used as a practice for the simulation, which becomes more important than the real thing. Finally, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, is another good example of postmodernism, especially metafiction, or fiction that is about fiction, about narrative and storytelling itself. The narrator doesn’t just tell stories—he comments on the stories he’s telling as he tells them, so that the collection becomes as much a meditation on the art of storytelling as it is on the Vietnam War and the events that occurred there. Language seems to shape reality as O’Brien emphasizes (like Vonnegut does), that our views of war are dependent on the stories we tell about war. Norman Bowker, for instance, who is unable to tell his stories, never recovers. And when the narrator tells Norman’s story but leaves important things out, Norman kills himself. Also, making jokes and using harsh, seemingly uncaring language such as calling dead bodies “crispy critters” helps the men control the danger of the world they face in Vietnam, another example of language shaping reality. The Things They Carried also displays the quality of indeterminacy, as narrator O’Brien is suspicious of our ability to get at TRUTH (with a capital “T”). Historical truth is hard to access because, in a true war story, “it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (71). You look away when a booby trap explodes or when someone gets killed. Plus, historical truth does not necessarily convey the emotion of wartime experience, what it felt like to be there. In that sense, O’Brien writes that “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (179). The idea that history itself is only a story we tell, that there is no such thing as objective history, is a characteristic of postmodernism, which blurs the line between fact and fiction, between history and story. .