Narrative Indeterminacy in E. Annie Proulx's Postcards and Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions

Abstract

The present thesis entitled "Narrative Indeterminacy in E. Annie Proulx's Postcards and Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions" is a study of narrative techniques in postmodern American fiction. In particular, the thesis focuses on the technique of narrative indeterminacy in both Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and E. Annie Proulx's Postcards. The introduction is mainly constructed around the problematics of meaning and representation in contemporary literary theory. It provides a historical overview of the shift in literary/narrative sensibility which had occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also seeks to establish that narrative indeterminacy is part of a broader cultural, intellectual and scientific movement which had shattered many foundational truths and instead fostered a general sense of skepticism: Darwin's theory of Evolution, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, G~del's Incompleteness Theorem and Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy all contributed to shattering the credibility of scientific truth. Also, the two major wars had cast many doubts about the possibilities of progress and had thus questioned the Enlightenment ideals of liberalism, humanism and egalitarianism. During the second half of the twentieth century, contemporary literary theory had projected a shift in emphasis from structuralist analysis to problems of interpretation and meaning. A growing concern with textuality as a locus of indeterminate signifiers, a condition of fluidity and slippage and a system of excessive signification had certainly cast doubt on the possibility of recovering meaning from discourse. This, in turn, translated into an assault on traditional definitions of narrative. Though operating within the confines of a formalist literary paradigm, Bakhtin's idea that the language of the novel cannot be laid out on a single plane and instead constitutes an orchestration of multiple intersecting and conflicting discourses not only stressed the