Postmodern Narrative Techniques in Robert Coover’s Story Collection; Pricksongs & Descants

Abstract

The modes of narration in postmodernist fiction are not identical with those of modernists and realists. They contravene readers’ expectations, making them most often astounded and baffled. This study sets out to discuss some of the techniques used by the American writer Robert Coover in his story collection; Pricksongs & Descants (1969) which are associated with postmodernist fiction. These strategies including metafictional techniques, fragmentation, ontological concern, and temporal distortion, will in the subsequent sections of this paper be explicated and elucidated. In this regard, the term postmodernism will be first defined and elaborated, and then some of the salient features of Coover’s selected work stated above, will be examined in order to demonstrate the title-mentioned claim. Not all the stories of the collection will in this study be provided an analysis of, but those which are of greater significance and are noticeable in incorporating postmodern strategies. Coover, it is argued, in the above-mentioned work, depicts events and situations most of which at odds with what readers are used to being provided with. Readers in Coover’s are thus no longer passive recipients of the created world of the author, but active during the narratives and are invited to make things out and come to a conclusion about the plausible outcome of events.