A core characteristic of postmodern fiction is uncertainty (Malpas 24). According to Malpas it questions the existence of reality itself and raises the question who constitutes what is real, and also asks what happens if there is a collusion between different kinds of realities colliding with each other. This uncertainty leads to schizophrenic understanding of the world. Postmodernism shatters the foundations of a given culture by showing the contradictions the culture contains, what it represses, refuses to recognize or makes unpresentable. The postmodern sublime is a concept which refers to the disturbance of everyday sense-making activity. It occurs when a person notices that the reality which he took for granted doesn’t really exist ( Malpas 136).
As postmodernism rejects the ability to capture a reality in rational terms, it also rejects the notion of religious truth. Postmodernism was a critique of modernists' search for truth and systems which could explain the world in a rational way. It stated that there are no systems of beliefs which can explain the world. Instead there is moral relativism and uncertainty. Malpas (135) defines moral relativism as follows: “[... ] truth is based on conventions and beliefs rather than absolute principles.” This approach weakens the strength of religions, which claim to deal with objective truths, that are presented from an outside authority above human beings, namely God. Religion is constructed entirely by human beings, and to think that one’s religion is right leads to intolerance and oppression of differently minded people: “The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think that you are right at all” (Bloom, 30).
Postmodernism as opposed to modernism is more religion friendly in the sense of accepting religion as accepting it as a mode of giving an individual’s life sense and pleasure, but rejecting it as giving ultimate answers to the origins of life: “The nihilism of modernism is replaced by uncertainty (...) (Lewis, 222)
Malpas, Simon. The postmodern. Oxon: Routledge, 2005.
Bloom, Allan D. The Closing of the American Mind. London: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.
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