A Postmodernist Reading of Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions

Abstract:

This study offers a postmodernist reading of  Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso  Sea, and  Kurt  Vonnegut’s  Breakfast of  Champions. Using argumentation as a method, it comprises an original work devoted to demonstrating that these novels are postmodern. While Tyler’s novel exemplifies postmodernism, a twentieth-century movement in art and literature, in its indirect narrative method, focus on ordinary humans, highlighting family disintegration, and demonstrating that marriage is no longer a safe anchor in life, Rhys’s emphasizes  Antoinette’s struggle for independence, uses irony, and is open-ended.    Vonnegut’s novel, similarly, makes use of intertextuality, depicts characters lacking free will,   employs collage, and selects a content and style that are both skeptical.  Obviously, each one of these novels reflects postmodernism in its own way.