10.

Narrative Techniques of Postmodern Literature

The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Collector by John Fowles

Postmodern literature is characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation or

the unreliable narrator, and often in defined as a style which emerged in the post-World War II era.

Postmodern works are often seen as a response against dogmatic following of Enlightenment
thinking and Modernist approaches to literature
Several themes and techniques are characteristics for writings in the postmodern era:

Irony, playfulness, black humor; Intertextuality; Pastiche; Metafiction; Magic realism;

Technoculture and hyperreality; Paranoia; Maximalism; Minimalism; Fragmentation;

Two writings that represents postmodernist literature are:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham which concerns three generations of women affected by
Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway.

The Collector by John Fowles.

Fragmentation is an important aspect of postmodern literature. We can find it in both novels, The
Hours and The Collector.
Fragmentation is represented by various elements, concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery,
all are fragmented and dispersed throughout the entire work.
Cunninghams The Hours is basically three different stories in one volume, divided and then
aligned newly to convey the jumping between three different time periods and three different main
characters, who are somewhat intertwined, but separated throughout most of the story. The author
seems to have been able to balance or explore themes successfully, subtly linking the three
characters through alternating chapters.
In each of these narratives, there are three women who want to make, as Mrs. Dalloway, "an
offering". They do some physical objects to assert their right to existence and their contributions to
the world. They struggle with "proportion," and these undertakings carry much more weight than
perhaps they should. They live for the moments when their aspirations and reality meet: "She is
herself and she is the perfect picture of herself; there is no difference."
Although it seems that all these stories are about different women in diverse periods of history;
eventually, the reader comes to know that all of them are related to one another through the story of

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Mrs. Dalloway. Each of three parts in The Hours Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Woolf, is
divided into several episodes and each part talks about one female character.
The three women in The Hours are presented in one routine day in their lives. One narrative
centers on a day of Virginia Woolf in 1923 when she starts writing Mrs. Dalloway, the other on
Laura Brown's one day life in 1949 reading Mrs. Dalloway and the third one on Clarissa Vaughn,
hosting a party in the late twentieth. Cunningham carefully blends together different women's lives
in different times and periods to show that all their lives are related to each other and they have all
the same dilemmas. As Cunningham depicts, its three stories that take place at three different
times immediately after or during an event that has changed the world, and each involves a
woman trying to find a way to live a world that is no longer what it was
The last episode of Mrs. Dalloway, also the ending of Cunninghams novel combines Mrs.
Dalloway with Mrs. Brown.
After Richards death, Clarissa goes to find Laura. Her first words to Laura are Here we are .
It has two levels of meaning. The first one is that Clarissa tells Laura that they have arrived at her
house. However, the second level is more significant: Clarissa and Laura are those who survive in
the end.
Cunningham unites the two women in the present in order to express that "all human beings are
interconnected in ways they may not fully understand".
Themes:
The human fascination with mortality;
The constraint of social roles;
Love
Women and feminity;
Time;
Dissatisfaction;

We can find in this novel a lot of elements of symbolism and imagery: water, flowers, clocks,
cakes, parties, novels, celebrity, darkness, shadow and light.
Major conflict is in the case of all three women is the internal conflict. Each woman fights
against her unhappiness in life. Virginia Woolf struggles against insanity, Clarissa Vaughn fights
her fear of mortality and Laura Brown wrestles with her feelings of being trapped in her life as a
housewife.
The author of The Collector shows us his novel from two perspectives. One of them is Cleggs
perspective, and another is Mirandas perspective, which is presented as a journal. From Cleggs
perspective we can find about his feelings for Miranda and his plans to make her love him. The
second perspective for the narration is told from Mirandas viewpoint and formatted as a journal
that she keeps during her captivity. She desperately wants to be set free. Even if sometimes she
feels defeated, by the end of her narration she is full of life and ready to experience the world
outside.
The choice of a particular perspective is always an invitation to sympathise with a view or to take

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side with the narrator. We can see how perspective may influence narration since Fredericks and
Mirandas perspectives are completely different. Their clashing viewpoints result from different
selves: the young man is a psychopath, whereas the young woman has many things he lacks: she is
talented, sensitive, intelligent. Thus the two have got different values, norms and ideas.
This changed perspective is typical for postmodern fiction, the reconstruction of different
perspectives is decisive for interpersonal and intercultural understandings as well as for social
competence.
The Collector themes are: class, power and control, photographic images, prison, collecting, the
tempest, art.
The butterflies have multiple symbolic meaning. The collection of butterflies is revealing
Cleggs sadistic nature and is a direct reflection of Miranda. Butterflies are also a symbol of class
distinction between Fred and Miranda.
The obsession appears in both books in different ways but similar to the features of postmodernism,
for example:
The three main characters in The Hours search for meaning in their lives and evaluate suicide
as a way of escaping the problems they face.
The Collector tells the story of Frederick Clegg, a man in his mid-20s who grows obsessed with
Miranda Grey, a beautiful teenager whom he watches from afar.
The central thought of the novels is the idea of postmodernism and the postmodern condition.
Going off of the idea of postmodernism, the novels are all about depicting what is real and what is
an illusion, but through different perspectives.
If is not the idea to take your own life is the idea of taking someone elses life because you are
not able anymore to relate with your own. We can see that the themes are similar in both books.
As the definition says paranoia is mental a condition characterized by delusions of persecution,
unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically worked into an organized system. It
may be an aspect of chronic personality disorder, in which the person loses touch with reality.
Obsession leads to paranoia, for instance we take Laura Brown, living her life in Los Angeles,
could relate to Clarissa Dalloway. But Laura had a serious problem: She was beginning to blur the
fictional world of Mrs. Dalloway with the realty of her own life. Or Clegg becomes unable to
tolerate Mirandas escape attempts and attacks. While he can manage his butterflies, Clegg cannot
control Miranda without killing her. This fact causes Clegg to become increasingly distressed and
paranoid, and may lie at the root of his inability to act when Miranda falls mortally ill.
In this case, game does not refer to the funny way of the word but the sick one, the sociopath, the
game of suicide or not. The way of abduction might be a game for Clegg, we know that Virginia
eventually ends her own life, so her deliberations about Clarissa partly reflect her own personal
struggle with the idea of suicide. Clarissa perceived immortality of movie stars and great writers,
particularly the way their memory will outlast the memories of those that have lived less public
lives, fascinates her. Laura Brown is an intellectual, she thinks at first that her fascination with
suicide is an objective, academic interest. She thinks that she would never actually be able to go
through with killing herself. But as she feels the constraints of her own life closing in around her,
she starts to seriously evaluate the idea of suicide. When she stands at the mirror staring at the bottle
of sleeping pills, her interest is no longer purely hypothetical.

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An unreliable narrator is one of the most powerful tools available to a writer. His unreliability
might be obvious to the reader throughout, it might be revealed gradually, or it might come as a
revelation that provides a major plot twist.
It is a character who tells the reader a story that cannot be taken at face value. This may be
because the point of view character is insane, lying, deluded or for any number of other reasons.
Sometimes the narrator is unreliable by nature. In other words, some stories are told by
narrators who are such terrible people that they cannot tell their stories objectively. In general, even
people who commit the worst crimes justify their actions to themselves.
Sometimes, the unreliability of the narrator is only gradually revealed. The reader may in fact
trust the narrator through much of the novel. With this approach, its important to layer in clues
throughout the first part of the novel without making them obvious. This ensures that in looking
back, the reader does not feel cheated by the switch.

The Hours:
Although the novel's narrator sure does like to get his free indirect speech on, it's clear that the
narrative voice is not at all limited by those characters' points of view. There are multiple moments
throughout The Hours when the narrator communicates information that none of the novel's
characters could possibly know, as in this passage from the novel's Prologue.
The narrator speaks in the third person. In each of the chapters, the narrator follows the
respective main character (Clarissa, Virginia, or Laura) through her thoughts. The narrator
sometimes diverges and examines what another character thinks about one of the main characters.
One of the advantages to using a third person omniscient is the flexibility of narrative distance
and character access. The narrative can hover apart and above characters or move in close into their
minds and out again into a larger view.