Playing with expectations: Postmodern narrative choices and the African American novel

African American writers have been producing critically successful novels using postmodern techniques. Because these writers and their techniques are complementary to one another, they have met and merged in a partial symbiosis. Initially, this movement reflected the efforts to advance, critically and otherwise, the texts of work by African American novelists. In a gradual process, these efforts have sometimes met and mingled with the efforts to promote critical acceptance of postmodern literature, or at least the legitimacy and usefulness of postmodern literary techniques. This study examines some of the novels by Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and Toni Morrison, who have been trailblazers in using such postmodern techniques in their work, and two novels by Colson Whitehead, a comparative newcomer, which demonstrate that this phenomenon was not limited to a certain time period nor destined to die out after a certain number of years.; African American writing has a need to be heard, read, and to gain an audience that is open, willing, and able to understand.{09}It is advantageous, therefore, for the African American novel to use techniques that allow it to reach a racially wide audience, techniques that will succeed despite the fact that writing for such an audience of readers risks losing a portion of some readers' identifications with the issues and points of view the novel presents.; If African American novels that use postmodern strategies function as small-scale narratives that are set up in opposition to hegemonic metanarratives in the Lyotardian sense, one must ask how these strategies are successful. This study examines how these novels were written in such a way as to offer readers an alternative mode of thinking to that offered by the larger and more widely diffused and self-distributing metanarratives. By providing realistic characters in ways which defy the metanarratives of race as well as the expectations of storytelling, readers are stimulated into new realizations about previously accepted ideas, and are prepared to spread the now-realized truth about the inaccuracies of the racist metanarratives.