Happy Endings By Margaret Atwood

An analysis of the characteristics of Postmodernism in “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood

“Happy Endings”
By Margaret Atwood

Postmodernism in literature

Modernism came into being with the Renaissance. According to Sarup (1993), Modernism implies the progressive economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation of the social world. The term Modernism emerged in the contextof the development of the capitalist state. Modernism prefers grand narrative texts, like the Bible, and classical stories. Crucial elements of modern texts are purpose, unity and totality.
Postmodernity refers to the incipient or actual dissolution of those social forms associated with modernity. It is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explainreality. The term Postmodernism is applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art; literature and culture emerged from Modernism, as a reaction to it soon after the end of World War II. .
Postmodernism has its origin as an eclectic, socialmovement in aesthetic, architecture and philosophy. It prefers mini narratives, celebrates incoherency, anarchy, disorder, indeterminacy, it sets no boundaries, and reality and truth are subjective.
In the Postmodern mind interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretation of what the world means to us individually. It is characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivismor relativism a general suspicion of reason. In addition , there is no absolute truth; traditional authority appears false and corrupt, because Postmodernism speaks out against the constraint imposed by religion and authority. Postmodernism shows disillusionment with modernism.
Some of the elements we find in postmodern literature are pastiche or combination of elements; intertextuality, whichis a previous knowledge of literary works, in order to introduce into or mention them in the new text. Another important element is metafiction, which is a fiction that deals, often playfully and self referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions; a broken chronology , also called temporal distortion, which is a literary technique that makes use of a nonlinear timeline; itrepresents the idea of disorder which in modernism had been seen as a negative quality, but which is now an acceptable representation of reality; magical realism is used to introduce fantastic or impossible elements into a narrative text, participation or textual intervention, a technique that attempts to involve the reader with the novel; for example, the reader can change the character’s names intoothers he/she likes.
A good example of a postmodern literary text is “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood, who was born in 1939 in Ottawa. She has received numerous awards, and she has written more than fifty volumes of poetry, children´s literature, fiction and nonfiction. She is best known for her novels.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the thoughts and the different elements, techniquesand resources from Postmodernism, used in “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood”

Happy Endings are ironically sad.
In “Happy Endings”, the author makes use of a number of postmodern techniques. To begin with, the form of her short story is typical of postmodern writings. The plot does not have the form a regular plot would have. The initial scenarios are simply descriptions of events that havetaken place, for example “John and Mary fall in love and get married”. Instead of a classical story, there is only one introduction where John and Mary met, and later the narrator presents many alternatives which are a series of possibilities that can be developed into a story. The author makes use of broken chronology, the reader can see clearly this technique in the lack of chronological events...