Calling the World from Isolation: Postmodernism in a Disconnected Age-6th

Introduction

Postmodernism isn’t a genre, it’s a way of seeing the world. It questions the systems we once trusted: truth, science, morality, progress. Postmodern literature and media often blur the lines between reality and fiction, use dark humor to explore trauma, and reject neat endings. Instead, they lean into fragmentation, confusion, and contradiction. Whether through metafictional storytelling, magical realism, or a winking acknowledgment of their own artificiality, postmodern works ask us to sit with discomfort rather than solve it. Each of the following examples—across fiction, poetry, and music—shows how postmodernism invites us to confront a strange and shifting reality.

Summary of Element One – Magical Realism and Disorientation

Links to Postmodernism in Your Literary Tradition Text

Inside Where You Belong centers around a surreal event: birds inexplicably falling from the sky, described through the emotionally muted lens of a child narrator. The event is delivered with unsettling normalcy—“They can't fly anymore”—reflecting magical realism where the extraordinary is absorbed into the everyday. There is no resolution or explanation, only quiet collapse. The story eschews traditional narrative structure entirely—there’s no rising action or climax, only a subtle drift toward detachment. In the narrator’s deadpan delivery, the grotesque becomes darkly comic, such as Doug beating a Doberman or the offhand line “No sh*t, Sherlock” during a birdfall. These choices critique not just the characters' numbness, but a broader cultural indifference to breakdown—of family, environment, and meaning itself.

Links to Postmodern Media Source(s)

In How to Disappear Completely by Radiohead, the atmosphere is eerily similar. The song’s hazy lyrics and ambient tone evoke a dissociation from reality: “I’m not here, this isn’t happening.” Like the story’s narrator, the song’s voice floats through emotional collapse with a dreamlike detachment. Both works express a sense of unreality and quiet desperation beneath the surface of the mundane.

My Take

Inside Where You Belong and How to Disappear Completely both capture the strange emotional fog of existing in a world falling apart—where reactions are muted, and reality seems just a bit off. Their shared quiet dread and surrealism made me feel like something deeply important was slipping away unnoticed.

Summary of Element Two – Black Humor and Fragmented Memory

Links to Postmodernism in Your Literary Tradition Text

In the poem Making a Fist, Naomi Shihab Nye reflects on a moment from childhood, but the memory doesn’t follow a clear narrative structure. Instead, the past bleeds into the present—the speaker is “still lying in the backseat behind all [her] questions.” This nonlinear layering of time is a distinctly postmodern move, resisting fixed truths and embracing subjective memory. The poem’s emotional impact is heightened by the mother’s odd but comforting answer: “You can no longer make a fist.” It’s part metaphor, part absurd logic—a survival mantra that makes no scientific sense but still provides meaning. This blending of the poetic and the mundane, the serious and the slightly strange, is a subtle form of black humor—finding grounding in the irrational.

Links to Postmodern Media Source(s)

The Night We Met by Lord Huron mirrors the poem’s tone and structure. The song drifts between moments of nostalgia and grief, without offering clarity or closure. Its refrain—“I had all and then most of you / Some and now none of you”—echoes the same yearning and confusion found in Making a Fist. Both explore how we carry unresolved feelings across time, seeking meaning in fragments.

My Take

Both the poem and the song use emotional understatement and circular logic to explore fear, memory, and survival. They reminded me that in postmodernism, comfort often comes from accepting—not resolving—our confusion.

Summary of Element Three – Poioumena and Hyperreality

Your Literary Tradition Text

While Inside Where You Belong doesn’t overtly break the fourth wall, it exhibits poioumena-like qualities through its fractured narration and refusal to offer narrative closure. The child narrator is aware of the emotional void surrounding them but cannot fully grasp or process it. This self-aware limitation of the storytelling perspective acts as a kind of quiet metafiction. The digital escape into video games and the dispassionate recounting of surreal events point to a postmodern sense of disconnection from reality itself. The world may be “real,” but the reactions and meanings are filtered through detachment and emotional simulation.

Links to Postmodern Media Source(s)

The music video for Humility by Gorillaz is a playful and brilliant example of poioumena. It features the animated character 2-D roller-skating through the real world, completely unacknowledged by the people around him. This fusion of cartoon and reality creates hyperreality—a simulated presence that feels more vivid than actual life. The video doesn’t just blur fiction and reality; it comments on that blurring. Lyrics like “Calling the world from isolation” reflect the loneliness beneath curated appearances—just like the narrator in Inside Where You Belong, who escapes into games as the world quietly collapses.

My Take

Both Humility and Inside Where You Belong explore what it means to be emotionally present in a world where reality feels increasingly constructed. The line between real and simulated is thin—and in both cases, the characters seem most alive when they are disconnected.

Conclusion

Each of these postmodern works leaves us with more questions than answers—and that’s the point. The collapse of birds from the sky, the child in the backseat asking about death, and the cartoon skating through Venice Beach all reflect a fractured world where meaning is elusive. Yet in these fractured worlds, there’s also connection: in the absurd, in the nostalgic, in the eerily calm. As each genre reveals, absurdity and beauty often intermingle. The human experience, it seems, involves finding purpose amidst fragmented, conflicting narratives—where truth is not delivered, but created, moment by moment.

Works Cited

• Gorillaz. “Humility.” YouTube, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5yFcdPAGv0.

• Lord Huron. “The Night We Met.” Strange Trails, IAMSOUND Records, 2015.

• Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Making a Fist.” Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Eighth Mountain Press, 1995.

• Radiohead. “How to Disappear Completely.” Kid A, Parlophone, 2000.

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Edited by Maurice Hindle, Penguin Classics, 2003.

• “Inside Where You Belong.” 6th Period Class Anthology, 2025.