Linguistic Sensibility of Richard Brautigan: a Reading of the Abortion and Sombrero Fallout

Abstract

The reading of a piece of post-modern fiction requires an understanding of its author's attitudes toward the written and spoken word. Many writers today question the ability of words to represent the phenomenal world and use words tocreate a fictive world independent or far removed from ordinary experience. Without this understanding, much contemporary fiction makes little sense. This study attempts to give a brief definition of the linguistic sensibility of post-modern fiction and to show how that sensibility elucidates what I consider to be the two best novels of Richard Brautigan.