A mimetic and narratological reading of postmodern fiction

Abstract

This thesis analyzes three postmodern pieces: “Scarlatti Tilt”, a short story by Richard Brautigan, The Body Artist, a novel by Don DeLillo, and Adaptation, a film by Spike Jonze, with an aim to prove that the structure of all three, though highly fragmented and complex, as well as the seemingly absent unified meaning eventually lead to a closure. A reinterpretation of mimetic theory and narratology is necessary to demonstrate how postmodern texts lend themselves to more meaningful interpretations. This thesis explores several mimetic approaches including ancient and contemporary ones to display that even postmodern texts are still referential in the sense that they reflect the perception of the postmodern era which itself is fragmented. Narratology analyzes texts in the light of sequentiality to attribute a narrative value to them; however, after reinterpreting the point of view, exposition and the communication model of narrative, which involves the participation of the implied author, the dramatized narrator, the model reader and the authorial reader, one can see that narrative quality does not necessitate a sequential order. Combining the reinterpreted narratological approaches mentioned above with the idea that mimesis continues to exist in postmodern fiction, this study claims that the fragmentation and emptiness in texts can reveal unified plots. The two-sentence-long short story “Scarlatti Tilt” narrates a murder which the text does not explicitly portray; the fragmented novel The Body Artist is the narration of a woman’s story by herself in the aftermath her husband’s death, and the film Adaptation displays that postmodern fiction may have to cooperate with conventional story telling, thereby being mimetic and narrative.