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Postmodernism is a cultural movement that emerged after World War II. When Modernism was mainly concerned with making it new; postmodernist literature examines conventional ideas like truth and fiction, suggesting that there is no ultimate truth or distinction between the two only multiple, fragments of truth. Postmodern authors, to covey those ideas use several different literary techniques. One of those is metafiction, which purposely draws attention to the fact that the reader is reading a fictional story, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Tim O'Brien 's The Things They Carried is a postmodern novel that uses fragmented narrative, a collection of short stories, rather than a linear storyline and metafiction to suggest that reality is the story society retells. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a play that also uses different theatrical and story narrative tricks to bring attention to the more significant issues in society. This essay will be looking at how The Things They Carried uses metafiction to criticize how war stories get distorted into fiction and the consequences of American military overabundance. Similarly, how Angels in America uses the same technique to break the fourth wall and to comment on religious extremism
Beneath its endorsement of dominant culture, The Things They Carried challenges American ideologies on the subject of war and retellings of war stories in society. The short story “The Things They Carried” uses metafiction to comment on postmodern war narratives. The Vietnam War was the first significant war in the postmodern era that had a major backlash from the general public. Thus, as Jameson's comments, “The first terrible postmodern war cannot be told in the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie,” implying that classical literature techniques, previously used, cannot describe the ambiguities of the Vietnam War experience. Previous war narratives usually had “an array of typical motifs: the noble example, the test of courage, the battle as initiation”; however, this does not fit in with the realities of what happened in Vietnam. This notion acts as a background upon which “The Things They Carried” seeks to expose and complicate the realities of war through fiction. The narrator is not just telling the stories; he is in the narrative as a young soldier as well as an older version of himself that tells the narrative from the future. By retelling his narrative, commenting, and retelling his fellow soldiers’ stories, the novel becomes a reflection of the art of storytelling and the events of the Vietnam War. O’Brien seems to emphasize that society's views on war depend on the kinds of stories retold about war. Molly Hite points out that the official history that gets retold often is structured like fiction.
The correlation between fiction and reality is perhaps best highlighted by the death of Ted Lavender. The narrative demonstrates how cultural scrips can hinder an individual’s ability to make sense of experiences that challenge those scrips. For Kiowa, this beak of cultural scrips comes in the form of watching Ted Lavender's death and being shocked by its lack of drama;
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