Postmodernism: Extraordinarily Ordinary Stories Ryan Rusin 12th Grade

Can fiction, when challenged beyond the boundaries of logic, ever develop into reality? Post-modernist thinking is a way of manipulating the beliefs and concepts that shape literature, but even more so the typical methods of storytelling. Instead of structuring ideas around utter fiction, it takes ideas designed around abstract philosophies, actual aspects of life and the universe, then develops them into fictitious accounts, allowing for the reader to broaden thought into something greater than the isolation of mere explicit textual meaning. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five and Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show revolutionized postmodernism by doing precisely this, uniquely designing erratic structures in which the stories are told, as well as placing a conflict of ideas between the reader or viewer. These works pointedly interrogate what the main protagonist is facing, doing, and thinking; this tactic leads to a conceptualization that reaches far beyond the depth of a modernist novel and, arguably, beyond the impact of other post-modern pieces.

The Truman Show opens a window looking out at an observation on the fascination with the ordinary, and the submission of our modern culture to succumb by many means to the...