When I read Lydia Davis’s “Television,” a word that comes to mind before any other is postmodernism. The story is narrated through a vocabulary and a tone of voice that sounds bored and detached. The narrator talks in first person singular, first person plural, and second person singular to communicate a boredom that, in her eyes, is present in all of our lives. The television shows she watches with her husband are the alternate realities they participate in to escape from the tedious monotony of their own lives.
The beginning of section two opens with the narrator saying, “It’s not that I really think this show about Hawaiian policemen is very good, it’s just that it seems more real than my own life.” They have forgotten how to make their own lives exciting, so they have gotten into the habit of receiving their daily dose of thrill from imaginative television stories, from other people’s more exciting lives. The stories and the advertisements and the predictions of the next day’s weather are just enough to carry them through the evening until it is time for them to go to sleep. It seems that, for the narrator, sleep has become the goal; that is all she really wants, because she has given up believing there is excitement to be found in her own life.
In the third part, the narrator describes her own life as something that seems to escape from her grasp. Like the television shows, it seems to detach from her, so that she can only perceive it as if it were appearing to her from far away, through a screen. As a sort of detached series of images and events, her life becomes painfully predictable, just like the TV shows she watches where the handsome deaf man falls for the pretty speech therapist. The narrator’s tone of detachment from her own reality and boredom of the predictable, monotonous nature of life summarizes postmodern thought and calls to my mind the writings of Chuck Paluhniuk and David Foster Wallace.
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