An Analysis Of Postmodernist Narrative Features Of E.L.Doctorow's City Of God

As an important Postmodernist writer, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow has been an academic attraction for many scholars of literature. In recent years, the Chinese reading public is gradually gaining access to his works via their Chinese translations.City of God is a new attempt by E. L. Doctorow with an innovative narrative style. It shows American intellectual life in the 1980s and 1990s which has been pursued by young writers, who are seeking the success of new writing style.The story unfolds itself with the stealing of the cross in Pern's church. The cross soon reappears on the roof of the small Upper West Side synagogue where Sarah and her husband, Joshua Gruen, also a rabbi, have started a new movement called Evolutionary Judaism. After Joshua died, Pem falls in love with Sarah, whose father is a Holocaust survivor. The narrator of this novel is Everett, who wants to write Pern's biography. Eventually Pem decides to quit Christianity altogether and convert to Judaism.For Doctorow, the fusion of history and reality is a reflection on his historical view: history is the product of the writing and rewritings of generations, and all history is but the textual record of it. There is no clear cut between history and fictionality. The first chapter is about the relationship of history and fictionalization. The fusion of history and fictionality is a major characteristic of postmodernist fiction. The fictionality in fiction and the reality in history help to explain why Pem changes his religion. The story is fictional, and Pem is fictional. This implies that the change of religion is not the idea of certain people, or some spontaneous thought. The reason lies in that the doubt over the existence of God has long existed, and the Holocaust in World War II proves that God indeed does not exist, and that He cannot bring salvation to those who are suffering.The second chapter is on narrative closure and its effects. One noticeable narrative feature in City of God is narrative closure. In the secret agent storyline, the closed linear narrative form is appropriate to the debased genre of the Hollywood screenplay. Narrative closure is inevitably the choice determined by the nature of this idea as well as the pragmatic purpose of its genre. Narrative closure avoids the complexity and ambiguity characteristic of the modern and postmodern novel, as well as meaninglessness and formlessness. City of God is a novel of process rather than substance, it places subjectivity into ideology, and maintains the continuity of subjectivity, and thus the novel is constructive.The third chapter is on heterogenic narrative and fragmentization: aesthetic meaning and philosophical extension. It redeems the strategic and deliberate use of narrative as a model for life lived ethically in the material world. The central conflict of City of God is the ethical problem of subjectivity, and the novel addresses it explicitly as a problem of language use. City of God's peculiar approach to character development aspires to encompass the infinitude of human experience of the real while preserving the specificity of the individual. The writing of the novel is based on real events and organizes several first-person narratives, which imply a more immediate contact between text and the outside world during writing. The fragments of verifiable historical figures serve to humanize the abstract principles to which these characters give voice. The real person and the events of the world become text, a fictionalized character that by convention is both faithful to and takes liberties with that real.Doctorow's novels tell us that the experiments in postmodernist fiction may help people to perceive the changes in reality in the last years of the 20th century. In the new century, practical thoughts are changing people's value system. The gap between serious culture and popular culture is disappearing. His innovation makes him an undeniable master of Postmodernist writings.