Deconstruction And Reconstruction In House Of Leaves:A Postmodern Reading

Mark Z.Danielewski's House of Leaves is a postmodern novel born in the light of the 21st century.Using multi layered narratives,Danielewski presents his readers an intriguing postmodern work.The story starts when a young social outcast called Johnny Truant discovers the manuscript left by a blind old man called Zampano.The manuscript is a commentary on a documentary made by award-winning photojournalist Will Navidson,who is haunted by his own house.Truant begins to sort out the manuscript,trying to find out what this dead old man noted in it.In the process of the reorganization,Truant also begins to discover who he once was and falls into a psychological break down.The four layers of the novel depends on each other to exist and together they reveal the relationship between literary work and criticism,author and reader.This thesis contends that House of Leaves,as a postmodern fiction in the new era,both inherits and elevates the distinctive features of the typical postmodern works.On the one hand,it covers most of the themes and forms of the postmodern woks,including the theme of labyrinth,language game and hybridizing of different genres and arts forms.On the other hand,it turns to a new tendency different from the traditional postmodern works.Other than focusing on pure "nothingness",the book pays attention to the psychological condition of the postmodern people and tries to find a cure for it.With the help of Derrida's deconstruction theory and Ihab Hassan and other scholars' research on Postmodern literature,this thesis explores the deconstruction and reconstruction of fictional world in this novel.First,the novelist uses metafiction,indeterrminacy and fragmentation in his work to deconstruct his fictional world and reveal the art of fiction writing and literary criticism.Second,he uses intertextuality and hybridization to create a fictional world.He freely manipulates all these narrative strategies to present us his story,constantly leading the audience into the labyrinth made up of reality and fiction.But,his purpose is not just to show the reader his postmodern experiments on fiction writing.He cares about his characters.The process of Truant's reading of the commentary is the process of his self-search,which ends in hopeless knots.But,at the end of the novel,Danielewski also looks into the possibility of healing for the invalid living in the Postmodern world.