Besides the fragmentation of identity discussed in the other post, Morrison uses other characteristics of postmodern literature in “Recitatif.”
To better understand this, I’ll discuss how the title impacts the narrative. French for recitative, the title of the story refers to an operatic vocal performance that straddles the line between talking and singing. It can also refer to an interlude between two major sections of a performance, or recital.
This indicates that Morrison wants the readers to view the relationship between the narrator Twyla and Roberta as something that is transient and only exists within gaps between the various stages of the women’s lives. This relates to postmodernism because of fragmented reality. Besides identity, the story deals with fragmented reality since Twyla is often uncertain of the facts of her memories of St. Bonny’s. The unreliability of memory is a hallmark of postmodern writing. This causes the reader...
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to question whether Twyla actually knows the truth, which calls to question her reliability as a narrator. The subjectivity of her narration forces the reader to question whether her version of reality is what actually happened.
Another way postmodern elements impact the story is through the limited capacity of language. The racial ambiguities are coupled with verbal ambiguities: when Twyla and Roberta both say they thought the other was “different,” the phrase could be interpreted to mean many things. On the one hand, the statement implies that each woman is generally prejudiced toward the other’s racial group yet thought her friend unlike the others in that group. On the other hand, this could mean that each woman held a false perception of the other: she thought that the other was exactly the same as herself, save the other’s race.
This demonstrates how language can be an ineffective, ambiguous means of communication that limits humans’ ability to understand one another. For the reader, this requires what Morrison has termed “paticipatory” reading. To appreciate Morrison’s message about language, the reader has to actively engage with the text and interpret the ambiguities.
All of these examples explain how Morrison uses postmodernism to construct the story.