Hassan’s essay makes several connections between Modernism and Postmodernism. He also attempts to create a divide between the two genres: “Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Unimaginable which Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments” (23). I think that the “Unimaginable” Hassan describes stems from a breakdown in communication. He writes of an indescribable feeling of fear, the familiar “litany of disasters,” that comes from the breakdown of language and the discontinuous narratives on which our society is built.
Modernism also emphasized fragmented forms, but unlike the Postmodernists, they found this fragmentation tragic. Faulkner’s writing moved away from a fixed narrative point-of-view long before Postmodernism became a literary movement. The difference is in the disposition of the Modern vs. Postmodern author. Faulkner lamented the fragmentation of humanity, whereas Postmodernism chooses to glorify it.
One of the Postmodern preoccupations is with the failure of communication and the inability to reconcile mutiple, contradictory narratives. Thus we are left with an abstract, fragmented string of narratives. Cage attempts to embody this fragmentation in his short story. He intentionally makes it difficult for the reader to follow any single narrative by randomly changing the text. Sometimes he keeps the text the same for a particular narrative, giving the reader a false sense of security. Eventually the text for each narrative changes, causing the reader to become lost in the strand of narratives.