A Postmodern Reading of Don DeLillo’s Short Stories

The focus of this paper is to study how different techniques are incorporated in the postmodern fiction to present the multiplicity of meaning and subjectivity of the reality. For this purpose, the researcher has selected American novelist and short story writer Donald Richard DeLillo’s short stories “The Itch” and “Coming. Sun. Mon. Tues”. The researcher has analyzed the selected works using the theoretical frameworks provided by Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon and Henri Bergson. The theoretical insights of the selected theorists help understand the subjective reality of the postmodernism. Textual analysis has been used as a method to study the selected fictional work. Postmodernism is critical of certain foundational conventions of philosophy, specifically, the Enlightenment thinking, as it symbolizes the pursuit of reason and logic. On the other hand, it focuses on the personalization and subjectivity in the construction of truth and worldviews. The rejection of objective reality gives way to multiple realities and subjectivity. American fiction, in the second half of the twentieth century, has been influenced by postmodernism to a great extent. The analyzed short stories provide a good postmodern reading since they cover a range of features that are relatable in the postmodern world.