Aspects of Fragmentation in Selected Texts By Donald Barthelme

Abstract

This thesis applies a postmodern perspective to Barthelme’s Paradise (1986) and Snow White (1967). This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter explores the background of the postmodern period after World War II and how this period had a great impact on shaping the postmodern movement. It investigates postmodernists' attempts to make sense of their fragmentary and sometimes bizarre experiences, as well as attempts to make sense of the senseless world in which they lived, beginning with meaningless language, identity loss, and the deterioration of all traditional life concepts. It highlights how Postmodernism revolts against every Modernist concept that speaks of reason and scientific progress, which control all aspects of life. Not only that, but it demonstrates how Postmodernism completely rejects the Modernist industrial mentality that resulted from revolutionary advances in scientific disciplines such as chemistry and physics, as well as how it rebels against Modernist rationalism and objectivism. Thus, the chapter reflects how Postmodernism is a representation of the unfinalized subjectivism and continuous inquiry into self-definition that possessed every postmodernist at that time, as they were continuously inquiring and questioning who they were socially, culturally, or even racially.