What characterizes American Modernist fiction in its treatment of time, identity, and language?

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Modernist fiction reshapes time, identity, and language by breaking from neat, predictable storytelling. Time is treated as flexible rather than linear—narratives jump, memories intrude on the present, and different moments are braided together to create a sense of how experience actually unfolds. Identity appears unstable or multiple, with the self shaped through different voices, perspectives, or interior consciousness rather than a single, fixed point of view. Language itself is experimental—streams of thought, unusual syntax, and voices collaged together—so the act of reading mirrors the complexity and fragmentation of modern life. All of this serves to convey a mood of disillusionment with traditional beliefs, social norms, and the idea of steady progress in the postwar world. By contrast, the other approaches align with earlier realism or didactic traditions that favor a straightforward plot, a single reliable perspective, or clear moral instruction.