The Night-Sea Journey And Tim O Brien's In The Field
688 Words3 Pages
Postmodernism is meta-fiction, it draws attention to itself as a work of fiction, and is self-conscious as being fiction. The postmodern authors are trying to expose the complicated relationship between fiction and non-fiction, by making the stories they tell all about fiction. Individuals are unique, original and authentic. The identity is a composite. It is constructed by the forces of culture around us. The typical form in postmodernism is science fiction, in which open forms, play, anarchy, process, and participation are very important. Both John Barth’s “The Night-Sea Journey” and Tim O’Brien’s “In The Field” can be identified as postmodern, but how?
John Barth’s “The Night-Sea Journey,” involves the reader in the process of producing…show more content… Tim O’Brien openly considers the relationship between fiction and memoir, often distrusting memory to accurately depict an event. “He remembered pulling hard, but how the field seemed to pull back, like a tug-of-war he couldn’t win, and how finally he had to whisper his friend’s name and let go and watch the boot slide away. Then for a long time there were things he could not remember. […] Later he’d found himself lying on a little rise, face-up, tasting the field in his mouth, listening to the rain and explosions and bubbling sounds” (O’Brien 2576). While O’Brien draws on many factual events or details, much of the work is also purely invented, and the author will frankly state that the work is not true. It is postmodern because it blurs the line between reality and fiction. Throughout the story there is much ambiguity about what is fictional and what is “real.” Furthermore, in the story there are “notions of ‘happening truth’ and ‘story truth’” (Chen 77), which means “a thing may happen and be a total lie: another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (qtd. in Chen 77). “Happening truth” and “story truth” are other aspects of postmodern texts, which makes “In The Field” a postmodern