Post-Modern Hyper Reality and Degenerated American Values in Shepard's Buried Child

Abstract

This research attempts to depict postmodernism as a style in order to reflect he degenerated American values in Shepard's play Buried Child. As a postmodern drama, the play embodies ambiguity, discontinuity, pluralism, perversion, deformation, disintegration, deconstruction and difference. And all these features are parallel with the degenerated family values of Dodge's family. Dodge, the center of he story is the patriarch, and his wife, Halie, presenting the old-time chauvinistic portrayal of women being part whore, live in the same house ostensibly but are in fact part. Shepard's intention in the play to create a narrative which communicated and eflected the frustrations of American people but at the same time he presents the ituation in entertaining ways through the techniques of blends between myths and eality. The rhetorical technique of post modernism is used in order to trace the isillusionment with the American dream and the downfall of traditional patriarch. It eflects universal frustrations of modern American people though the setting is quite grarian. The postmodern style which Shepard uses incorporates surrealism and ymbolism in the realistic framework of a family drama. He is able to create images in he imaginations of people through the use of surrealism and symbolism, evoke and arness the experiences of his audience through its postmodern. Thus, regarding the tyle, Buried Child incorporates many postmodern elements such as the mixing of genres, the deconstruction of a grand narrative, and the use of pastiche and layering.