Postmodern Ambivalence of Identities, Moralities and Law(lessness): The Detective-Criminal Continuum in Caleb Carr’s The Alienist Muhammad Furqan Tanvir*, Dr. Waseem Anwar**, Dr. Amra Raza*** ABSTRACT: This paper aims at highlighting a major pattern of differences between classic realist and postmodernist detective fiction by arguing that whereas the former, in spite of occasionally foreshadowing future developments in this respect, generally tends to retain an ideological split between people operating from the right and the wrong side of the moral/state law, the latter derives its narrative force from a sweeping and tumultuous ambivalence functioning at the core of the ideology of these two supposedly heterogeneous categories of characters. A preliminary survey of a few selected texts shall denote the premise of the proposed distinction between classic and postmodern detective fiction, followed by a comparatively detailed analysis of this trope in Caleb Carr’s critically acclaimed historical thriller The Alienist (1994) to illustrate how the merging of identities of the detective and the criminal in a continuum contributes to a substantial problematization of value system in postmodern detective fiction. Keywords: Postmodernism, detective fiction, Caleb Carr, The Alienist, narrativity, ambivalent identities and morality * Email:
[email protected] **Email:
[email protected] ***Email:
[email protected] Journal of Research (Humanities) 122 The ostensible ideology of a traditional text of detective fiction mostly