Entropy In William Gaddis's Novels

William Gaddis (1922-1998) occupies a very important position in postmodern American literature. Together with Pynchon, Barthelme and Hawkes, Gaddis has earned his reputation as one of the precursors and masters of postmodern American fiction. Despite the fact that Gaddis is generally considered as "one of the most highly regarded yet least read important novelists", he had finally achieved the recognition in the Euro-American literary circle with his thematic concern over the inherent contradictions and weakness in the postwar American society and his ingenious postmodernist artistic innovation. But for various reasons, there is hardly any critical review of Gaddis's works in our country. This dissertation focuses on entropy in Gaddis's novels with the intention to reveal the characteristics in this postmodernist writer and promote the study of American postmodernist fiction in the academic circle of our country.His novels are considered as microcosms of American society in late capitalism. In his novels, entropy is not only an important concept formally discussed, but also becomes the theme and structure in all his narratives. In his entire writing career, Gaddis has been a social and cultural critic, showing his deep concern over the entropic collapse in the post-war American society and the tangible threat of disorder in the postmodern human world. His four novels directly or indirectly assay entropy in the American capitalist system, capitalist culture and individual selfhood. He points out the infernal state of post-industrial America characterized by crass materialism, decadent morality, undemocratic social politics, hegemony, sterility and sickness of modern culture and man's alienation. At the same time, Gaddis exposes a labyrinthine capitalist world haunted by ambiguity, indeterminacy and contingency by employing the entropic postmodern fictional world.Entropy and salvation constitute the cores and dialectical tension in both Gaddis's postmodern human world and his fictional world. His novels are Janus faced, not only tearing down what's wrong with the postmodern American society, tracing to the sources of the American values, exposing the social injustice, economic inequality, fraudulence, the threats of abusing high technology and decadent morality when commodity fetish and free-enterprise system have become the monolithic systems, but also suggesting new ways to establish order and counter against the entropic decline in the postmodern human world. Though Gaddis doe not give any definite answer in saving the entropic human world, he tells the readers to live deliberately, to have the courage to live in a contingent universe. Thinking that traditional narrative is no longer fit to express the historical discontinuity, the alienation of human beings in the postindustrial society, Gaddis assiduously searches for new and unique writing techniques such as the disrupted time and space, indeterminate fictional writing, fragmented, discontinuous conversation full of informational entropy to manifest the deconstruction of communication, which is the symptom of the decay of postmodern civilization and reinforces its decline. His novels also present the aesthetic features of reconstructive tendency in postmodernism such as hybridization, carnivalization,performance, participation and constructionism.This dissertation "Entropy in William Gaddis's Novels", aims to study this difficult and brilliant author comprehensively, his postmodernist outlook, his literary innovations, his concerns over the entropic decay of the postmodern world and his progressive ideas in exploring new ways to save the world. In order to understand Gaddis's commanding position as one of the greatest novelists of postwar American literature, it's necessary to take the dialectical method, combining historical, cultural study together with textual analysis which includes narrative structure and discourse analysis. Whiling viewing Gaddis's fiction as postmodern, this study does not deny its continuity with the American liter...