Structures of Reality: Postmodernist Fiction and Reality

This paper tries to deal with the shifting terrain and changing concept of reality beginning from its formative stage in the 18th century till date. The postmodern novelists like William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut jr. and many others mainly focus on narrative displacement. The linear narrative strategy is replaced with a disjointed and disruptive articulation that underpins the destabilized, uncertain, ponderous subjectivities of the characters. Such a realization has allowed a polyphonic possibility, resulting in a schizoid representation of the individual and society. The very conceptualization and narrativization of reality has resulted in a playful irrealism. These novelists engage themselves in an antifoundational exercise in articulating human experience in a world of shifting terrains where real is irreal and truth is relativized.