2. Postmodernism
Postmodernism refers to a historical period that began in the late 1940, a style in literature, philosophy, art and architecture. Circumstances like World War II, Cold War, invention of atomic weapons, moon landing and even alien phenomena are some of the factors that pushed authors to break from ordinary writing topics and start thinking outside the traditional storytelling techniques.
Postmodern novels are often characterized by feature such as: fragmentation, presence of authorial voice within the novel that addresses the readers himself, a mixing style in the same text, non-linear plot, introduction of science-fiction elements and sometimes postmodern authors chose an absurd and ironic point of view to convey their stories …show more content…
Any enumeration of such aspects is doomed to remain incomplete, since the very nature of the postmodern involves seemingly endless proliferations, like the monotonous lists found in DeLillo’s novels or the almost numberless brands of colas found in supermarkets.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut plays with the postmodern narrative techniques right from the first chapter by offering the readers a new perspective of narration by breaking traditional storytelling techniques throughout the whole novel, revealing to the readers not just how his novel begins but also how it ends, then he continues with the second chapter as a revolt against conventions of storytelling and finally in the further chapters he leads his novel to another characteristic of postmodernism: the subversion of time by space, reality by …show more content…
Robert T. Tally Jr analyses the sense of homelessness in Slaughterhouse-Five in his book A postmodern Iconography, Vonnegut and great American Novel Much of the bewilderment encountered by characters in the novels has to do with their sense of being lost, of not knowing where to go. To be sure, that homelessness existed before; it can be seen in Don Quixote and in the novels of Thomas Wolfe. But in the postmodern, there is an even more alarming realization: there may not be any underlying referent. That is, not only can you not go home again, but there was never a home to begin with. Hence, a possibly crucial distinction between the modernist and postmodernist sensibilities: whereas the modernist eulogizes a lost home, community, or prelapsarian stasis, bemoaning the fragmentation of what was once whole, the postmodernist recognizes—in some cases, celebrates— fragmentarily as the state of being, denying the existence of a prior, Edenic, pure, and wholly circumscribed state in the first
Postmodernism refers to a historical period that began in the late 1940, a style in literature, philosophy, art and architecture. Circumstances like World War II, Cold War, invention of atomic weapons, moon landing and even alien phenomena are some of the factors that pushed authors to break from ordinary writing topics and start thinking outside the traditional storytelling techniques.
Postmodern novels are often characterized by feature such as: fragmentation, presence of authorial voice within the novel that addresses the readers himself, a mixing style in the same text, non-linear plot, introduction of science-fiction elements and sometimes postmodern authors chose an absurd and ironic point of view to convey their stories …show more content…
Any enumeration of such aspects is doomed to remain incomplete, since the very nature of the postmodern involves seemingly endless proliferations, like the monotonous lists found in DeLillo’s novels or the almost numberless brands of colas found in supermarkets.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut plays with the postmodern narrative techniques right from the first chapter by offering the readers a new perspective of narration by breaking traditional storytelling techniques throughout the whole novel, revealing to the readers not just how his novel begins but also how it ends, then he continues with the second chapter as a revolt against conventions of storytelling and finally in the further chapters he leads his novel to another characteristic of postmodernism: the subversion of time by space, reality by …show more content…
Robert T. Tally Jr analyses the sense of homelessness in Slaughterhouse-Five in his book A postmodern Iconography, Vonnegut and great American Novel Much of the bewilderment encountered by characters in the novels has to do with their sense of being lost, of not knowing where to go. To be sure, that homelessness existed before; it can be seen in Don Quixote and in the novels of Thomas Wolfe. But in the postmodern, there is an even more alarming realization: there may not be any underlying referent. That is, not only can you not go home again, but there was never a home to begin with. Hence, a possibly crucial distinction between the modernist and postmodernist sensibilities: whereas the modernist eulogizes a lost home, community, or prelapsarian stasis, bemoaning the fragmentation of what was once whole, the postmodernist recognizes—in some cases, celebrates— fragmentarily as the state of being, denying the existence of a prior, Edenic, pure, and wholly circumscribed state in the first