Kincaid's "story" raises all sorts of questions: who is the speaker? What is the context for all of these admonitions? Why are these tasks so important? How is this even a story?
While it is hard to define the "postmodern," one thing that is characteristic of postmodern literary texts is that they tend to undermine conventional notions of author, reader, and text. In the case of "Girl," we can see these principles at work. For one thing, the text itself doesn't appear to be a story at all, just a kind of monologue. The traditional features of a story, like a clearly-defined narrator and characters or a plot, seem to be lacking.
This calls into question the nature of the author: since we're not sure what it is we are reading, we can't be sure who wrote it. This undermines our relationship to the text as readers:...
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the story is less something that is told to us, and it becomes a site of readerly investigation.
The use of second person in the story also complicates the question of character. The directives in the story seem directed as much at the reader as they are to a fictional "girl" character. As the target of the story, the reader is left to reconstruct for herself what has been omitted: who is speaking, what the social context for these words might be, and the values the speaker is trying to communicate. In trying to understand the words as a "story," the reader must construct another story in her head—the one that did not get written but is only suggested here, one that explains why the girl might be a "slut" and what to do about it.
The idea of "Postmodern" writing is to develop a new way of what the writing medium can represent. Postmodern writing thrives on being able to develop new forms of written expression that break from the traditional narrative structure. For the Postmodern writer, deconstruction is the most important element. This deconstruction results in a new vision of writing that can challenge preconceived notions of what defines "writing." Simply put, Postmodern writing techniques seek to change what was once previously understood about writing into something new.
Kincaid's story features some of these techniques in its postmodern style. One such example would be how the story is really just a speech, and not a formalized story with a definite structure. Kincaid's work is more akin to a " type of lyric poetry called the dramatic monologue than it is like most short prose fiction." This is an example of a Postmodern writing technique because it challenges what the "story" should look like in form. Another example of a postmodern writing style is the narrative. Exactly who is speaking and where their relationship exists is thrown into question, another example of the Postmodern deconstruction writing technique revealing itself:
...the entire section could be the daughter's own internal monologue. What if the daughter is simply imagining this oracular, maternal discourse, extrapolating certain worries expressed by the mother in day-to-day asides?
Absolute clarity is absent because this does not necessarily exist in the Postmodern construction of reality. This technique plays with point of view and temporality, ensuring that time and focus are challenged in a style that is deconstructing reality in order to illuminate a new aspect of it.