On Indeterminacy In Joseph Heller's Picture This

Joseph Heller earned his great literary fame with Cathch-22, which is described as"the American counter-culture bible of the 1960's", and Picture This is a late-stage work of his. This research is an attempt, in the light of Derrida's différance and Ludwig Wittgenstein's family resemblances theories, to explore into the indeterminate qualities and features of the novel at both literary and philosophical levels.The traditional novel takes as its essential elements definite themes, plots, and characters while the postmodernist novel believes indeterminacy of those elements to be its fundamental feature. The notion of indeterminacy was embryoed in the womb of the peculiar social and cultural environments and the technological innovations in the 20th century. And this paper aims at a study into the indeterminacy of themes, plots and characters in Picture This.The indeterminacy of themes in the novel is displayed by the sixteen irrelevant major themes, and the half irrelevance and complete irrelevance between the title and its content of each small chapter, and that of plots is exhibited by its illogicality, discontinuity, and mixing-up of facts and fabrications. Despite the fact that indeterminacy is mostly embodied in themes and plotting, composed in a definite manner are some parts of the novel, revealing Joseph Heller's usual themes: dehumanizing bureaucracy, mindless wars and the hypocritical values. On the other hand, the indeterminacy of characters is exploited to an extreme point in the novel: the indeterminacy of Socrates'existence in history; that of Aristotle in contrast to his classical image; and the desanctified portrayal of all those famous figures; the positive depiction of a negative character; and the slighting treatment of the King's death. All the above strategies subvert the traditional notion of determinacy in narrative composition, which is further deconstructed by another feature of this novel, the"unbridled thickness"of themes, plots and characters.This discursive writing notion of indeterminacy is characteristic of postmodernist fiction, providing brand-new perspectives, imparting an uncanny possibility of interpretations, and revealing, rather than drawing a definite conclusion, a special aesthetic quality with its narrative surface, contemplating, questing, and subverting. As a result, the readers could be induced into multi-angled and diverse-layered reading and thinking, their knowledge structure broadened, their understanding of life deepened and enriched, and their mind enlightened. In other words, by reading a novel from different perspectives, the reader will recognize that there are entirely different narrative perspectives and logic. The traditional mode of textual structure is dethroned (not either-or but either-and-or), and even the mode itself is extra-textual.Picture This, as an earlier postmodernist work, is characterized by indeterminacy while still preserving some traits of determinacy. This peculiarity exhibits great value in helping study writers and their works set in the transitional period from modernism to postmodernism.