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Fahrenheit 451 Postmodernism Essay

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Postmodernism is a term that is applied to literature and the arts, which reflects the societal and cultural changes that occurred after World War II. The prosperity of the 1950s led to the rise in consumer spending, and as a result, the United States became a consumption society. Mass media shaped and defined American cultural identity, and technological advances led to feelings of uncertainty and paranoia similar to the world Bradbury envisioned in his novel Fahrenheit 451. Postmodernism rejects a distinction between high and low culture, changing the definition of what classifies as literature and art. It also rejects absolute truth because truth is relative. Postmodernists believe that the world is impossible to understand because there …show more content…

Postmodernism holds that the individual interprets his reality, therefore, it is imperfect and not universal. Thus, human experiences are fragmented because there is not one reality: what is real and what is not are interchangeable and subject to interpretation. In Don DeLillo’s “Videotape,” a little girl uses a video camera to record a murder, and her recording is broadcast on television. This is an example of postmodernism because it examines the different viewpoints. The narrator interprets the many perspectives, the television viewer, the girl, the victim, and even that of the reader. DeLillo makes the reader a character by using second person perspective, “You don’t think of the tape as boring or interesting...It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you’re thinking” (1461). The reader is a part of the story and plays a part in the drama. The narrator knows the reader’s thoughts and is not afraid to tell the reader what they are, almost implicating him/her as part of the problem. “Videotape” also examines the effect of technology on society. The recorded murder is “running forever,” and the viewer has seen it “so many times [he] knows from the handwave exactly when he [the victim] will be

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