An analysis of postmodern narrative strategies with specific reference to Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

摘要

My dissertation focuses on an analysis of postmodern narrativestrategies in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being(ULB) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting ( BLF) . Byanalysing the postmodern ab/use of narrative strategies, I arguethat postmodern fiction marks a decided shift from both classicalrealism and modernism.My dissertation has predominantly been motivated through mycontention that postmodern fiction is not elitist as it has beenperceived to be. Rather, I suggest that postmodern fictionab/uses narrative strategies to deconstruct the ontologicalboundaries between the political and private and fiction and'fact'. Consequently, postmodern fiction interrogates thecontrived intelligibility of History. A further argument thatI raise is that postmodern fiction through its (re) appropriation,subversion and use of parodic structures creates.narrative spacefor the Other.In order not to canonize Kundera's texts, I situate both ULB andBLF as 'nodes' within a diffuse network of intertextualdiscourse. My analyses of the postmodern narrative strategiesin ULB and BLF, attempt to interrogate the diffuse 'nature' ofpostmodern fiction which resists both authorative analysis andclosure.In exploring the relationship between recuperation and postmodernnarrative strategies in ULB and BLF and other works and/or textsof fiction, I argue that postmodern fiction does not revel in itsnarrativity, it constitutes, instead, a political strategy