This critique endeavors to analyze Alex Michaelides' novel The Silent Patient (2019) in the light of Lyotard's theoretical philosophy of postmodernism. Postmodernism is a contemporary movement that poses significant challenges to conventional assumptions of knowledge, rationality, truth, and objectivity. The concept of postmodernity also involves the discussion of a complex set of ideas and theoretical discourses which resist a fixed definition and final closure. Jean Francois Lyotard's theory of postmodern metanarratives versus mininarratives was proposed and published in his The Postmodern Condition (1979). For this study, textual analysis as a research method has been used to trace the presence of postmodern characteristics in certain words, dialogues and conversations between the characters. The research ends with findings and recommendations for future research.

The oppressive British and chauvinistic Japanese colonialism imposed a hegemonic culture in Africa and China. Things Fall Apart by Achebe and Red Sorghum by Mo Yan demonstrate British and Japanese colonial misshaping of African and Chinese cultures respectively. In response, the indigenous writers sustain their identity and culture crumbling under colonial corrosion. Things Fall Apart deals with the bitterness of colonialism in Africa, while Red Sorghum deals with Chinese colonial experiences. This article addresses the question how these authors, despite their different spatial and temporal contexts, encounter the hegemonic administrative structures and discourse. The principles of intertextuality are exploited to unveil the colonial governance structure and the literary reassertion of the colonized. Postcolonial theory helps unearth the colonial strategies and retrieval of the colonized identity. Said’s ‘filiative’ and ‘affiliative’ principles help evaluate how these ‘liminal intellectual(s)’ encounter the oppressive ideology

hrough Julia Kristiva's intertextuality, this study explores the diasporic version of identity in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient - the text that is based on Ondaatje's inspiration from other literary and non-literary texts: Rudyard Kipling's Kim, Herodotus' The History, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and the story of Gyges and the Queen. This theoretical inscription locates the source of the expression of the meaning of the text: either the author or the text per se. It argues the intertextual narration of Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan living in Canada, about the fragmented identities of the diasporas in the post-World War II milieu. This intertextual approach highlights the politics working behind the location of the characters, their (dis)placement from/to their origin and their identity in the post-WWII time. The framing of these intertextual discourses helps understand the contexts of diaspora characters as well as diaspora writers.