ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the formal narrative techniques and demonstrate precisely how they encourage readers to share in the complexities and dualities of Latino labyrinth. The modernists’ portrayal of a barren reality and their emphasis upon the isolated and ineffectual individual in society vividly contrasts with the exuberance of first Latin American writers and later Latino writers as they approach the reality of their worlds. The techniques of fracturing narrative point of view which innovators like William Faulkner utilized extensively and which seem such a crucial aspect of recent Latino fiction reflect a decentered experience common to marginalized people which is also, as Phillip Brian Harper says, a “constituent of the postmodern condition”. Latino writers take hold of modernist narrative devices flexible enough to demand that readers share their sense of incertitude. Certain Latino writers employ multiple perspectives and odd chronologies not as mere literary devices, but because they often wish to present the Latino world nonjudgementally in all its complexity.
