The postmodernists wrote stories that often: (1) merged "reality" and "illusion" to

the point that distinctions became a matter of interpretation;

(menggabungkan realitas dan ilusi untuk menunjukkan bahwa perbedaan menjadi
masalah penafsiran)
(2) further blurred the line between "reality" and artifice through "fantasy," games,
mimicry, parody;
(3) called attention to themselves in an attempt to make authentic the act of
knowing; and
(4) used apparent disconnection and incongruity as techniques for creating
coherence.

Plots were either fully realized, represented as a base chain of events not
necessarily causal, truncated, as in the modern story, or abandoned altogether (thus
antistory).

Metafiction (telling a story about telling a story, etc.) was of special interest to the
early postmodernist short-story writers, since the desire to address the text and
even the writer within the text was different from what had become the
conventional use of "reality" to ground the story. In fact, many writers viewed
reality itself as a fiction, a mere construct. The narratives, therefore, made
metaphysical sense by calling attention to themselves as artifice in an at- tempt to
view our world through another lens.

Another development associated with postmodernism in the short story, and
particularly with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, is a movement called
magical realism. This kind of story often presents reality as what is ab- surd, and the
absurd, the magical, the transcendent as what is real. In fact, mag- ical realism seems
to be in a direct line to the folk traditions and myths of a distant past.

(Postmodern approaches to the short story / edited by Farhat Iftekharrudin)