A Broken Kaleidoscope-an Analysis Of The Postmodern Features Of Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father

Viewed as "father of the new generation of postmodernism writers", DonaldBarthelme ranks top among the most influential postmodernism writers. With theapplication of innovative genre, style and language, and such writing techniques as collageand parody, Barthelme juxtaposes intentionally incongruous elements of contemporarylanguage and culture, creating an atmosphere both humorous and unsettling. His worksdisplay evident characteristics of fragmentation and indeterminacy. He combines languagegames, non-linear narrative and postmodern allegory together in order to reflect the vacuityand meaninglessness of postmodern society.The Dead Father is Barthelme’s second novel. Published in1975, the novel tells us asimple story: the Dead Father’s two children Thomas and Julie, leading a group of19volunteers, drag the huge body of the Dead Father with strong cables to the burial groundand push his body into a deep hole with a bulldozer in order to prevent him fromresurrection.“A Manual for Sons” is a book-within-book, inserted between Chapter17andChapter18, followed by a text explaining the characters of fathers. Barthelme appliesseveral postmodernist techniques to The Dead Father. He dissolves the language, rejectsthe conventions of fiction, subverts the allegorical genre and expresses his unique idea onthe ancient theme of father-son relationship.The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One gives an introduction topostmodernism and Donald Barthelme’s life and career as well as a literature review onhim. Chapter Two to Chapter Four are the main body of the thesis and analyze The DeadFather from three aspects: the indeterminacy of language, the fragmentation of content andthe decanonization of allegorical father-son relationship. The postmodern characteristic ofindeterminacy can be seen from the author’s writing strategies in wordplay, style andapplication of metaphor. In traditional fiction, characterization, plot and description ofenvironment are three basic elements. But in The Dead Father, Barthelme dissolves theseelements and breaks the novel into pieces. The Dead Father is a pile of fragments, no longer holding the characteristic of wholeness and completeness. In addition, Barthelmeexpresses his unique idea on father-son relationship in The Dead Father, which is a typicalpostmodern allegory and cannot be analyzed from traditional psychoanalysis or Lacan’stheory. Barthelme subverts the traditional allegorical genre, and meanwhile creates a newone, which is evidently postmodern. The last chapter is a conclusion, summing up thewhole thesis. A detailed postmodernist analysis of The Dead Father not only inspiresthinking on American postmodern society and literature, but also provides a newperspective for domestic researches on Donald Barthelme.