Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood: A Postmodernist Reading

Abstract

This Thesis applies a postmodernist perspective to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977). Postmodernism is a literary and cultural philosophy that emerged in the late 20th century, which rejected modernism through its own techniques, elements, and characteristics. Postmodernism maintained economic, social and political aspects in connection with literature and art. Mainly, the three novels under study are being analyzed using two essential fictional styles; magical realism and historiographic metafiction. Additionally, there are techniques such as intertextuality, parody, and pastiche that represent postmodern ideas. This thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, postmodernism is studied as a philosophy or a broad movement, which has passed through many phases including post-colonialism, modernism, and surrealism. Moreover, the characteristics that identify postmodernism and represent the movement are tackled, as well as the movement’s relation with other movements and approaches as as marxism, feminism and post-fordism. Also, postmodernist techniques are generally illustrated under the shadow of identifying them as postmoderist techniques which are magical realism, historiophraphic metafiction, intertextuality, and other techniques. In the second chapter, the novels are analyzed through examining the use of magical realism, after a detailed explaination of the technique and its characteristics, along with the tools adopted by the two writers, to emphasize the political, social, and economical aspects of postmodernism. Chapter