In this chapter we shall examine the common narrative strategies and world views that surface in the works of Antonio Muñoz Molina, Juan José Millás, José María Merino, Enrique Vila-Matas, Adelaida García Morales, and Cristina Fernández Cubas. Many of the narrative techniques and ideas that these authors share could be considered postmodern; others, however, might better be though of as examples of something Navajas (1996b) calls ‘beyond postmodernity’. He suggests (1987) that one important characteristic of postmodern narratives is the lack of any unitary meaning of the kind we find in the typical nineteenth-century realist novel, and that this has been replaced by multiple, vaguely connected meanings that often lead to an open and inconclusive ending. A second postmodern feature is metafictionality, the purpose of which is, in Waugh's words, ‘to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction’ (1984: 6). Logically that statement has to be made outside the fiction proper, as, were it to be included in the text of the story, it would blur the distinction between fiction and reality. Metafiction, then, points either to the fictional character of reality (postmodernism) or to the reality of fiction (beyond postmodernism). Reflections of this nature often come in the form of intertextual dialogues which a writer establishes with other literary works, often from previous centuries, or occasionally with literary critics. The dialogues recycle old fictions and apply them to a contemporary context, and the result is a new understanding both of those texts and of today's reality.

In postmodern narratives, writing runs counter to our everyday commonsense perception of the world, and readers are not permitted what Navajas calls (1987: 17) ‘an asylum for awareness’: a place where one may escape consciousness and avoid the challenge of the unknown by repressing it or classifying it as ‘fantastic’ and unreal. Contemporary narrative often focuses on the realities we try to avoid and exposes our unwillingness to confront them. While it would be typically postmodern to think of the realities from which we hide as negative and as posing a threat not only to our society's ethical and social stability but also to its ethical and social ideals, several Spanish novels of the late twentieth century turn that source of potential negativity into a fount of new meanings and new perspectives on history and ethics. These are the novels Navajas categorizes as being ‘beyond postmodernism’. In these narratives of the 1980s and ‘90s, history is viewed subjectively through individual stories, and postmodern nihilism is often replaced by an ideal which Levinas describes as the ‘little goodness’ of everyday life that appears inviolable despite any dissolution of ‘big’ ideals (1999: 118). It is precisely this which brings us to what Navajas calls the ‘partial assertion’ of literature that is beyond the postmodern (1987: 21).