Metafiction, Black Humour, and Alienation: Postmodern Identity in John Barth and Haruki Murakami

Abstract

The paper analyzes metafiction, black humor, and alienation as prisms through which the identity of postmodern identity in works by John Barth and Haruki Murakami reveals a fragmented, performative self. Barthian metafiction takes its toll: Lost in the Funhouse is full of narrative mazes, asides, and diagrams, undermining authorhood; Sabbatical is full of intrusions of the we-lovers into the Author, and computer-generated disclaimers, satirizing Cold War absurdities. Black humor intensifies alienation; the grotesque suicides in The Floating Opera are a parody of exhaustion. Murakami is a mix of existential realism and mild surrealism: Toru in Norwegian Wood is drifting through suicides (Kizuki, Naoko), trying to find himself through the frailty of Naoko and the energy of Midori. Such short stories as Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey (name-stealing primate), The Second Bakery Attack (trauma-driven heist), and Sleep (insomniac liberation) use deadpan irony in the context of loss, and there is an implicit reflexivity in dream blurs. Barth's bombastic dismantling of self is the opposite of Murakami's pessimistic survival, both dissenting from fixed selfhood to flux, performing text against relational emptiness through humor to maneuver the absurdity.