Subjectivity in postmodern narrative discourses : A Reading of Kurt Vonnegut

Abstract

This dissertation centres on a reading of subjectivity in postemodern narrative discourses. Because boundaries between disciplines are broken, any written practice can be read in terms of a narrative discourse entailing a subjective history/story whose space is based on a self-reflexive language. The traditional conception of language as transparent mirror of the real is no longer tenable, and the Cartesian individaul as autonomous originator of meaning and truth is fragmented into different ‘selves’ determined most of the time by specific contexts. It follows, then, that any reading of a narrative discourse should take into account the discursive formations that make the ideology of a text. In this sense, postmodernism can be said to problematize such discursive formations by explicity installing contradiction and fragmentation wich traditional discourses used to hide for ideological reasons. The constituents of ‘fiction’ are certainly affected by postmodern practices. The conception of the author as autonomous creator is replaced by that of a subject both constituted and constituting. He is constituted by the discoursive formations of his subjectivity but constituting within socio-historical and ideological constraints. The same can be said about both charater and reader whose socially constructed subjectivity undermines any ideological reading of character as representative of universal human values which the reader is supposed to take for granted. Secondly, fiction in postmodernism is freed of its secondary position in its relation to reality. Because fiction and reality are social and linguistic contrusts, fiction is reality and reality fiction. Also, as a postmodern narrative discourse enfolds theory and as theory becomes a sort of narrativen the gap between theory and pratice is closed. Kurt Vonnegut is here a case in point. Therfore, with the advent of postmodernism and with the disruption of boudaries, multiplicity, discontinuity and indeterminacy prevail.