An Analysis Of Look Who's Morphing

Much like Pynchon did when postmodernism was still getting established as a literary form, several postmodern writers of the early 21st century have also focused on the significance of popular culture in their works. Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing (2009) is a collection of narratives that are connected to one another and are trying to examine and subvert the concept of culturally constructed identities. Throughout the narratives, Cho uses many internationally known American pop culture references, in order to emphasize the issues that Chinese-Australian migrants often deal with. Apart from the use of and references to technology and popular culture, which can be significant for migrants to be able to express themselves, the author inserts himself

However, the first person narrator experiences various transformations, by morphing through different stories, from one character to another. The morphing narrator is the product of the author’s insertion into the text but does not necessarily represent Cho himself. The act of him morphing into characters of various sexes and nationalities, which is primarily the source of parody of the original works of popular culture, enables also a deep analysis of racial, cultural and sexual identity, and is enabled by the existence of popular culture in the first place. In “The Sound of Music” narrative, Cho is focusing on the way identity is depicted in popular culture. Here, the narrator morphs into Maria, and is encouraged by Mother Superior to go live in Switzerland, while Captain von Trapp rejects Mother Superior’s suggestion that he/she is impressionable,

The references to and significance of popular and mass culture are also used to show how different postmodern views on identity were compared to modernist literature. Out of the two selected works, Thomas Pynchon uses historical and popular references, mass media, and paranoia to draw out his character’s journey to attempt to find herself, as well as to point out the postmodernism’s new views on cultural and individual identity. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon creates an exemplary postmodern world, filled with television shows, popular songs and advertisements, and with the use of multiple versions of reality his character is experiencing, and the conspiracy theories influencing her perceived reality, his novel is able to eradicate the previous modernist views on the creating of identity. Instead, he presents a new postmodern version of identity, which is based on the idea that identities are multifaceted and constantly able to change. In Look Who’s Morphing, Tom Cho goes even further with the notion of subverting the concept of a unified identity. Using the narrative device of self-insertion into the text, he is successful in deconstructing certain long-established notions of nationality, culture, sex and gender, that are presented within these narratives. By inserting himself into the subverted texts of popular