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Chapter 6  Conclusion

Although Carver claimed not to be a postmodernist writer, the characteristics of his writing suggest that postmodernist cultural trends had an influence on him to some extent. Hu Quansheng, who studies the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, asserts that the postmodernist novel is derived from the modernist novel, and that without the emergence, development, maturation and culmination of the modernist novel, there would be no postmodernist novel, which is a continuity of influence, philosophical foundations, linguistic outlook, and experiments in writing techniques of the modernist novel. It is therefore not difficult to see the light of postmodernist characteristics shining in Carver’s works, and that is one of the reasons why the author chooses to analyze Carver’s works from the perspective of postmodern metafiction, a perspective that few researchers have bothered to address. 

Carver once said that he was opposed to a fixed, uniform way of writing and hated to think of the end of a story before it was written, enjoying the random leaps of thought and ending abruptly at a certain point in the process. This way of thinking is in line with the spirit and literature of the postmodernist context. In the previous section, we have analyzed the unique metafictional techniques in Carver’s works, such as self-reflectivity, intertextuality, and fragmentation, but at the same time, we need to explore why Carver uses these techniques to represent characters, stories, and narratives, and how do they contribute to the thematic interpretation of the narratives?

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