SOURCE: "Modern Narrative Technique: Jarry, the Pretext," in Sub-Stance, No. 36, 1982, pp. 72-81.

In the following essay, Stillman asserts that Jarry's short novels "illustrate many modernist theories and techniques. "

Alfred Jarry's influence on successive generations of writers is both explicit, in the sense of direct recognition by his heirs, and implicit, in the sense of creating a climate propitious for textual experimentation and for changes in conceptual foundations.

Much critical attention has been devoted to Jarry's role in avant-garde theater, and specifically to his fathering of the Theater of the Absurd. Ubu's legacy traces its iconoclastic path through Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, to the Theater of the Absurd, which, generally speaking, is metaphysical, irrational, provocative, and given to "black humor." The Dadaists perceived a kindred spirit in Jarry owing to his treatment of language, his desire to shock, and his grotesque allegories of social conditioning...