Perspectives

Literary perspective

The short story “Weddings and Beheadings” by Hanif Kureishi was written in 2006 and takes place in modern times. The story presents the realities of war in the Middle East and the effects it has on people living inside war zones. The structure of the story is unusual, since the plot is not presented in a traditional manner, and the story is built like a monologue. The story uses the first person and sometimes even the second person point of view to present the events, and the narrator addresses the reader frequently. The language is simple and informal, like that of a conversation. Irony and dark humor are also quite frequent in the text. All this would suggest “Weddings and beheadings” is a postmodernist work. The postmodernism movement tends to prefer writings in the first person, but there are cases in which the second person is...