This study will examine two novels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Don DeLillo's White Noise, focusing on the extent to which the two books suggest that "truth" can be found. The first obvious point is that the "truth" which these two postmodern books are concerned is not a conventional or traditional truth. In the first place, the two works are novels, which means that the realities depicted are invented by the authors. In the second place, the two works are postmodern novels, which means, in part, that the fictional realities they depict are another step removed from conventional reality, or traditional "truth."
The modernist . . . perspective presupposes the possibility of objectivity grounded in fundamental, intrinsic, and universal (or classic) transcendent values and essential, autonomous, and self-sufficient objects, texts, and actions (Stiles and Selz 2-3).
In other words, the modernist tradition holds that "truth" is an objective reality, that there is a deeper meaning to life, and that such meaning can be discovered through art.
The postmodern perspective, on the other hand, in general holds the opposite belief, that there is no objective meaning to be discovered, and the individual artist cannot even discover his own identity in art:
The advent of postmodernist contingency placed modernist objectivity in doubt. Identity and human subjectivity were no longer understood as unified but rather were viewed as polymorphous, fragmented, and without center. . . . The modernist belief in truth was replaced by alternatives ranging from radical relativism to negotiated concepts of truth (Stiles and Selz 3).
The two novels reflect the latter, or postmodernist, perspective, as far as the "truth" is concerned. Simply because they do not attempt to portray or find a conventional "truth" does not mean that they disdain truth entirely, for they certainly do not. The "truths" they portray, however, ...