Postmodernist Features In Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

The novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is the one which is written from aten-year-old boy s point of view and is the most impressive one of Roddy Doyle s. Itis regarded as an impressive technical achievement and literary critics have done a lotof research on this novel from many aspects like narrative discourse, characters,theme, and postmodernism. This thesis is attempting to make an analysis of itspostmodernist characteristics, such as black humour, fragmentation, etc. This thesis isdivided into five parts.Chapter One is a general introduction in two ways: brief introduction to RoddyDoyle and the work Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha; and literature review. Chapter Twobriefly introduces postmodernism. It also discusses the emergence and developmentof postmodernist fiction. Then it discusses postmoderninst style in Roddy Doyle swriting. Chapter Three analyses one postmodernist characteristic: black humour indetails. Chapter Four discusses fragmentation in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. ThePostmodernist characteristic in the fiction is to some extent reflected in sentencestructure and text structure. This chapter will probe into this novel from the threeways of juxtaposition, open-ending, and the intrusive author.Chapter Five is the conclusion. Through the detailed analysis of Paddy ClarkeHa Ha Ha s postmodernist style in terms of postmodernist characteristics, this thesiscomes to a conclusion that in the author s view, the novel embodies Doyle s wishes toget rid of constraint of traditional writing and pursue freedom and innovation. At thesame time, the novel shows that Doyle s deep concerns on the common social issuesin contemporary Ireland have no contradictions with his new postmodernist writingtechniques yet the two postmodernist writing techniques are quite important forRoddy Doyle to finish this work.