Impersonation in Postmodern Fiction: A Reading of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

Abstract

Although it is fairly obvious that there is no consistent agreement among postmodern critics on the nature of the constitution of character, postmodern literary theory tends to address with skepticism, if not outright rejection, the conventional dichotomies pertaining to identity. This rejection of hierarchal social conditions and cultural constructs for the purpose of creating a new image and aspiring to live up to that image in the eye of the group is what I term the "impersonation phenomeno