Serious literary writing from the time Modernism came onto the scene with WW1 has been primarily made up of shattering of narrative elements. Time itself is broken and collaged, structure is collapsed, cause and effect can go out the window, the novel can parody itself suddenly, dialogue can be absurdist, and characters can become flattened so we don’t see them as warm humans that we care about in a personal sense at all, or they can be impossible and contradictory, and the whole novel can be self-reflexive, playing on the artifice. The world being perceived as so shattered and irrational now, literary writers can feel it inaccurate to portray it as being unified, going along in a reliable, cohesive manner full of [...]