摘要：The present essay explores the postmodernist features in Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996). The novel is in deep intertextual debt to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) because of superficial similarities in plot, multiple narrators, and various chapters, as well as thematic elements which led to winning 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and the Booker Prize. Although both modern and postmodern tendencies can be found in Swift’s novel, this study endeavors to analyze overt postmodernist features in this work as a postmodernist model in literature. The selected literary work is analyzed in accordance with the peculiar notions and theories that are more visible in Swift’s dramatic achievements including Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of the end of grand narratives and Jacque Derrida’s deconstruction. As an instance of a postmodernist work of art, Swift’s Last Orders seems to include ambiguity, complexity, differance, pluralism, uncertainty, and decentralization that are varieties of language games. These features pertain to character, resistance to interpretation, delogocentrism, and minimalism.
