Last night a literary wag argued to me that Dave Eggers and Jonathon Safran Foer should be similarly categorized under "postmodern voice that undercuts its own voice (sic!)." How wrong!

Surely they do quite different things. Foer writes about his own experience by viewing it from the outside--nothing shatteringly post- about that--and he does it with surroundingly well and with enormous compassion for the other.

Dave Eggers writes about his own experience from his own point of view, in his own voice (nothing compassionate or surrounding about that). He interrupts himself to question what's going on and why he's constructing the story the way he is, but that doen't stop him from constructing it that way. It just reminds you that this is one of many possibilities, and points to others. Nothing new about that, either—at least, it was the aim of Bertolt Brecht's acting technique, if not his writing, back in the 1930s.

I'm willing to make a bet with you, wag: show me a featue that is new in a postmodern writing practice, and I'll find where it existed before 1970.