Collage,Parody And Word-play:

Donald Barthelme (hereafter referred to as Barthelme) occupies a unique position among the American postmodern men of letters. Compared with other writers, he creates works with distinguishing features, among which the most obvious one is his consistent attempt to apply different kinds of postmodern writing techniques to his literary creation, to present postmodern era. Therefore, his works have been called "experimental fiction" and he himself has been entitled "father of the new generation of American postmodernist writers". Although the traces of postmodern writing techniques application can be perceived in almost every short story or novel written by Barthelme, it has been unanimously agreed by all readers that his second novel, The Dead Father, should be a perfect example of the demonstration concerning the postmodern writing techniques.In The Dead Father, it is collage, parody and word-play that play the most important roles as representatives of postmodern writing techniques. The novel can be called a canon for these skills. Through the investigation of these three writingskills application, this thesis attempts to reveal that Barthelme manages to reflect the postmodern society viewed by him in his unique way, and succeeds in expressing his intention to challenge the previous literary conventions which are inefficient to display the postmodern era, and finally he subverts and surpasses the traditional literature..The thesis will first present the performance of collage in The Dead Father, in terms of both pictorial collage and verbal collage. The second matter it expounds on is the application of parody in this novel from the levels of image, story and discourse. Then, the thesis discusses another postmodern writing skill, word-play, with special attention to list, contradiction and direct speech used as narrative discourse. Moreover, the present author indicates that by the application of these three typical postmodern writing techniques, Barthelme accomplishes a postmodern novel to display postmodern society and manages to offer ways to challenge and surpass the literary conventions as well as traditional literature.