A Postmodernist Reading of Sam Shepardʹs Buried Child

This paper attempts to analyze postmodernism as a style in Shepardʹs late-twentieth-centuryʹs play, Buried Child. As an example of a postmodern drama, Buried Child embodies ambiguity, discontinuity, pluralism, perversion, deformation, disintegration, deconstruction and difference that Ihab Hassan has identified as essential to postmodern works. Moreover, it is attempted to show that in his depiction of American Family in decline, Shepard brings into account a consideration of postmodernity according to Baudrillardʹs theory of "simulation" and "loss of the real", Derridaʹs concept of "deconstruction", andLyotardʹs theory of "the fall of grand narratives". Finally, the study reaches the conclusion by displaying that all these features altogether have been the real key to the sense of fragmentation felt among the family members, which bring to light the postmodernist environment of the postmodern world.