The Dissolving Self: Identity Crisis in Postmodern Fiction

Jyoti Dutt

The Dissolving Self: Identity Crisis in Postmodern Fiction

Author(s)	Dr. Jyoti Dutt
Country	India
Abstract	The postmodern novel is distinguished, among other formal features, by its sustained and often unresolved preoccupation with the instability of the self. Where the realist and modernist traditions that precede it, whatever their differences, generally retain some notion of an interior consciousness available to be discovered, developed, or excavated through narrative, the postmodern novel frequently stages identity as a construction without secure foundation: performed rather than possessed, mediated by image and simulation rather than authenticated by depth, and fractured across competing, sometimes irreconcilable, narrative selves. This paper examines the representation of identity crisis in six landmark works of postmodern fiction -- Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, Don DeLillo's White Noise, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club -- reading them against the theoretical accounts of the postmodern condition offered by Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Linda Hutcheon. Employing a qualitative methodology of comparative close reading, the paper identifies four principal modes through which these novels dramatize identity crisis: the dissociative fracturing of the self under trauma; the dissolution of the self-investigating subject into the object of its own investigation; the erosion of authentic selfhood beneath a saturating media and consumer culture; and the deployment of metafictional and historiographic strategies that expose identity itself as a narrative construction. The paper argues that postmodern fiction's treatment of identity crisis should be understood not merely as a thematic concern borrowed from existentialist or psychoanalytic tradition, but as a formal enactment of the same epistemological skepticism toward totalizing narratives that Lyotard identifies as constitutive of the postmodern condition, such that the crisis of the self and the crisis of narrative authority become, in these texts, functionally inseparable.
Keywords	postmodern fiction; identity crisis; fragmented self; metafiction; simulacra; unreliable narration; the decentered subject
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-20

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The Dissolving Self: Identity Crisis in Postmodern Fiction

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