On The Game Of Subversions In Snow White

The latter half of 20th century has witnessed radical changes on economy, culture, science and thought in America. In this social condition, a group of postmodernist writers represented by Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, to name only a few, began to appear in American literature. These writers are delighted in innovation and experiments with the language and structure of the novel. Their works share some similarities: they deny the objective depiction on the external world, emphasize the constructive function of language, and take on a playful attitude toward their works. Donald Barthelme is one of the most influential American postmodernist writers. His innovation even changes the forms and styles of American short fiction, thus he has been proclaimed as the most imitated writer in America.Currently the study on Barthelme in China has just taken the initial step, with most effort on the postmodern writing techniques as well as the life of the author himself. Compared with the situation in China, in America most of the writings of Barthelme have been studied carefully from the perspective of the language, style, culture and so on. Therefore, one of the purposes of this paper to look into his novel Snow White is to promote the interest in this important postmodernist writer and his works. Moreover, with the quite great progress in material civilization, human being's spiritual world and ethical progress attract increasing attention. Therefore, I believe that the postmodern writing technique indeed deserves our attention and effort, while the theme which highlighted by these absurd and weird techniques deserves more and is of more significance.In Snow White, masterpiece of Donald Barthelme, he applies postmodernist writing techniques such as parody, collage, etc. to make experiment on language thus showing his originality in artistic creation. In an absurd form, the writer mocks and satires the modern American society from different perspectives. Through textual analysis, the thesis explores how Barthelme applied the postmodernist narrative techniques in Snow White to reflect the changing morality in postmodernist literature.The thesis falls into three sections as follow: the introduction part first gives an overview of the context i.e. postmodernism, including the evolution of postmodernism and its features. In addition, it also briefly introduces the author and his masterpiece Snow White.Chapter One is an exploration of the thematic significance of the novel Snow White, which mainly embodies in two aspects: the alienation of the mainstream values and the degeneration of the humanistic spirit in postmodern time. To some extent, postmodernism, which takes as its aim to subvert and transcend modernism, has become a topic that can not be evaded for any country or nation in the world. As for China, the ideas of post-modernism enable us to be more acutely aware of the possible danger at the initial stage of modernization, thus avoiding following the same disastrous road in the Western modernization.The following three chapters analyze how Barthelme applies the postmodernist narrative techniques which include the technique of parody, the technique of collage and the art of indeterminacy in his novel Snow White. Chapter Two mainly illustrates that Barthelme subverts the traditional narrative mode by parodying the theme and characters of the traditional version. Parody had long been employed in modernist writings ever before postmodernism came into being. But in Donald Barthelme's Snow White, the parody holds the postmodern feature of hybridization, which differs itself from that in modernism. The parody of the theme breaks the expectation of the readers, and exposes the control imposed by traditional narration on the readers. The parody of the characters depicts the distorted human nature in modern America. Chapter Three demonstrates respectively the three kinds of literary collages in Snow White: the pictorial collage, the collage of"found materials"and the collage in terms of the fiction form. All of these postmodernist techniques rest on indeterminacy, which will be discussed in Chapter Four. Indeterminacy is not only one of the essential postmodernist techniques but also an important postmodernist theme, as has been vividly demonstrated in Barthelme's Snow White. As Barthelme has claimed that "Our Song of Songs is Uncertainty Principle," the novel is composed of indeterminacy: the indeterminate identity of the characters, the shifting narrators, the distorted time and space, and the free-association of word meanings. All the indeterminate factors demand the readers' participation, with which the exploration for meaning can be really completed.The third section is a conclusion of the whole thesis. Snow White, which ridicules and rebels against the traditional fairy tale, is a typical work of postmodernist literature. It reflects the changing morality in postmodernist literature. Viewing text as wordplay and adopting experimental writing form and style, Donald Barthelme questions and subverts the traditional writing mode. As a typical and outstanding postmodernist novelist, Donald Barthelme reveals from a new and deeper angle human beings'living and spiritual condition under the postmodernist context.