READING CULTURE IN POSTMODERN NARRATIVES

Abstract

Postmodernism evolve from various cultural contexts and it is not independent of cultures but rather a direct representation of cultures. It is pertinent to note that all the narrative strategies in postmodern literature represent the cultural changes. In other words, fragmentation in postmodern literature is nothing but a reflection of fragmented culture. With its widespread influence, postmodern narrative strategies have been adapted in various cultures and locations. The fiction becomes an amalgamation of plural narrative patterns that correspondingly work to inscribe and dismantle the existing fundamentals. There are no fixed criteria to assign specific boundaries among various narrative strategies; they intersect each other indispensably. Subversion of the metanarratives has led to pluralism and multiplicity, and it creates an environment of polyphony in the postmodern novel. The postmodern problem with metanarratives creates a natural scope for multiple narrative patterns in the fiction. In other words, all the strategies are parts of the postmodern plurality, and they inescapably rely on each other. For instance, in a magic realist text, apart from having magic realism as a key narrative strategy, other narrative strategies such as parodical inversions, playfulness, Bakhtinian carnivalesque, and postmodern historiography also coexist in the culture of pluralism. Hence, the research paper investigates how narrative strategies in postmodern literature are foregrounded in various cultural contexts, and their meanings exist in the cultures itself.