Fragmentation in Postmodern Literature
Let's hop in our Shmoop time machines and head back to the 18th century: a little period we like to call the Enlightenment. Enlightenment folks were all about order, rationality, science, reason, and unity. Yeah, not exactly a postmodern manifesto.
As with any movement worth its salt, Enlightenment thinking had its fair share of challengers. And as time went on, new movements started to flourish and to tap into social changes that were the order of the day. After Romanticism and Gothicism had their run, modernism came around the corner—after World War I, the modernists were all about uncertainty, alienation, and fragmentation.
Sound familiar?
Yeah, the modernists and postmodernists had a lot in common. But here's the thing: modernists tended to express a sense of sadness about this turn of events (hello, The Waste Land ), seeing the fragmentation as something to be mourned. Some modernists even tried to cling onto order, using art as a beacon of meaning in a world where meaning seemed to have been totally lost.
Postmodernism, on the other hand, doesn't hanker after these qualities or try to hold onto them. Quite the opposite: it embraces the idea of fragmentation and uses it to create playful texts that reflect and explore the chaos of the world. No attempts to find some sort of grand meaning or insight ("grand narratives," that is); these dudes were skeptics to their souls.
Chew on This
Featuring several unreliable narrators who all have their own version of events, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) turns its back on the idea of a "master narrative." The story at the heart of the novel keeps being reinvented to the point where we can't pinpoint an absolute truth: instead, we're dealing with multiple, individual truths that depend on who's doing the telling. How does this modernist text relate to and differ from the postmodernist texts that came after it?
Want to see how fragmentation can work in both a stylistic and thematic way? Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is all about fragmentation; given that its protagonist travels around in time, we'd expect nothing less. This fragmentation not only lets Vonnegut play around with time and place; it also reflects the sense of psychological fragmentation that our protagonist is going through.