The purpose of this research is to examine the narrative techniques of postmodernist fiction, with a focus on The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles and The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow. The plan of the research will be to set forth the origins and characteristics of postmodernist literature as a response to previous modes of literary style, and then to discuss, by means of comparison and contrast, how these novels are consistent with the postmodern style. As appropriate, reference will also be made to the work of other postmodernist practitioners, with a view toward defining on one hand and assessing on the other, the attributes, position, and strength of the literary method.
The literary style known as postmodernism attained currency in the years following World War II. In linear time, postmodernism may be said to follow that of modernism, which was itself a response to nineteenth-century late-Romantic or Victorian narrative conventions (Murphy 12). One could say, indeed, that postmodernists Fowles and Doctorow are to modernists Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce, as the modernists are to romantics Dickens and the Brontes.
The notion that the postmodern response to modernism represents a dramatic break with the past, however, may not necessarily stand if Doctorow and Fowles are to be considered postmodernists. In this regard, it might be well to refer to Martin Esslin's remarks concerning the once controversial theater of the absurd, "Avant-garde movements are hardly ever entirely novel and unprecedented. The Theater of the Absurd is a return to old, even archaic, traditions. Its novelty lies in its somewhat unusual combination of such antecedents, and . . . what
may strike the unprepared spectator as iconoclastic and incomprehensible innovation is in fact merely an expansion, revaluation, and development of procedures that are familiar and completely acceptable in only slightly different contexts" (Esslin 228). ...