NONFIC: postmodern narrative techniques

The assumption behind [postmodern nonrealist fiction writers'] work is that "reality"-- that set of assumptions about life that we negotiate communally on a day to day basis-- is so unsatisfactory, or so extraordinary, or so absurd that conventional mimesis is no longer adequate to convey the essence of that world. Many American writers since the late 105-s, feeling this pressure, have either turned to nonfiction forms-- autobiography and documentary...-- or... to nonrealistic forms, what Robert Scholes has called "fabulation." (302-303)

The plural notion of reality inherent in this philosophical position -- the legacy of Einsteinian relativity and quantum physics -- erods the importance of plot: life cannot be experienced or understood as a simple linear sequence of causes and effects. (307)

Describing a project that was never actually completed, [Anderson] says the book will be "the autobiography of a man's secondary self, of the queer, unnamed fancies that float through his brain, the things that appear to have no connection with actualities." (308)

... Barthelme's questionnaire for the reader in Snow White forces us to think about the author's purposes in retelling the fairy tale. As mentioned before, the assumption underlying these narratives is that life itself is a fiction, based on a series of temporary arrangements, so that paradoxically the only "realistic" narrative is the one that continually draws the reader's attention to the fact that everything is fictional. (314)

- Stouck, David. 1985. "Sherwood Anderson and the Postmodern Novel.' Contemporary Literature 26(3): 302-316.