Postmodern Elements in Sheeba Shah’s Novel Facing My Phantoms

Abstract

Sheeba Shah's Facing My Phantoms carries the postmodern elements like parody, irony, intertextuality, metafiction as well as incompleteness to subvert the then Nepalese historical and political events after 1930s and also critique the ideologies like feudalism, patriarchy and Maoism. In doing so, Shah introduces the character, Sanjeevani who narrates the whole story in which the story of Sanat is overlapped. Sanat's story carries the history of Nepal after 1930s that is parodied with the modern story with the help of irony. Self- reflexivity is developed by narrator's references, allusions. To reveal the fictional nature of the work itself metafictional techniques are used. Bringing different ideas, references from the genres especially from the history in the literary text gives the sense of intertext. Similarly, Shah is very much carful in the matter of using language thus, she uses the postmodern techniques that Facing My Phantoms is structured as a postmodern experimental novel.