The Writing Devices Of Donald Barthelme's Postmodern Fiction

Donald Barthelme, the lhther of the new generation of postmodernism in the.U.S.A., is one of the most exciting and strikingly innovative writers in the postwar era. He published more than one hundred and fifty short stories, four novels, and dozens of literary criticisms. He was a creative lhntastic writer, and experimented with nonlinear narrative and absurdist techniques in his fiction. The writers during his age were doubting the very reality of the political events they were witnessing: the blunders of the Johnson administration, the lies of the Nixon administration, the Vietnam War, the Watergate debacle, the prolifrration of the nuclear weapons, etc. All the official versions were being questioned. The blurring of fi~ct and fiction brought about a new mode of postmodern writing that filled the linguistic gap created by the disarticulation of the official discourse. Barthelme抯 fiction is characteristic of puzzles, fragmented narrative, the abuse of cliches and the burlesque enunciation of social and historical events, which gives a sense that one must accept the limits of language and its trashy condition. In his writing he often used advertising slogans, street slang, popular song lyrics, stereotyped phrases of the day, industrial and military jargon, cliches and Ihded jokes in an ironic way so as to leak out their hidden significance secretly. His characteristic fiction often seems to be constructed as collage-- a pasting together of fragments gathered from the chaotic verbiage of American culture. He once stated that new reality could be created by effectively pasting together irrelevant objects. The thesis analyses Barthelme抯 fiction text of this period, from which we could learn how he questioned the official discourse, parodied and mocked at the traditional writings.