Kincaid's "story" raises all sorts of questions: who is the speaker? What is
the context for all of these admonitions? Why are these tasks so important? How is this even a
story?
While it is hard to define the "postmodern," one thing that
is characteristic of postmodern literary texts is that they tend to undermine conventional
notions of author, reader, and text. In the case of "," we can see these principles at
work. For one thing, the text itself doesn't appear to be a story at all, just a kind of . The
traditional features of a story, like a clearly-defined narrator and characters or a plot, seem
to be lacking.
This calls into question the nature of the author: since we're
not sure what it is we are reading, we can't be sure who
wrote it. This undermines our relationship to the text as readers: the story is less
something that is told to us, and it becomes a site of readerly investigation.
The use of second person in the story also complicates the question of character.
The...
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