| ISSN: 2583-4371 | ISSN: 2583-4371JOURNAL ARTICLE
Keywords: postmodern narrative; digital memory; identity ; surveillance; metafiction
Abstract: The current paper, "The Candy House" by Jennifer Egan, is an important postmodern novel that questions the issues of memory, identity, and surveillance in digital reality. In contemporary literary criticism, the triangular relationship between memory, identity, and surveillance in The Candy House receives inadequate attention, likely due to the common interpretation of these three themes separately. This paper fills the gap in understanding how memory is commodified and its effect on identity formation under digital surveillance within a postmodern narrative framework. This paper discusses how Egan presents his fragmented structure, polyphonic voices and metafictional strategies to demonstrate how the commodification of memory and fragmentation of identity are presented in the novel through algorithmic culture. The gathering of textual evidence was performed out of the novel itself, and the review of the academic context was conducted to place the results. The discussion brings out the way the novel is both an archive and a machine of literature and reveals the concealed expenses of voluntary surveillance and hypervisibility. The novelty of the study is explained by the integrative approach in which the narrative form is viewed as the active criticism of the digital conditions but not its passive reflection. The paper ends with a conclusion and a recommendation to the ongoing literary studies to include the ability of formal experimentation to complicate and challenge digital epistemologies, recommending the application of interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of modern fiction in an era of datafication.
Article Info: Received: 27 Nov 2025, Received in revised form: 22 Dec 2025, Accepted: 03 Jan 2026, Available online: 15 Jan 2026
DOI: 10.22161/ijtle.5.1.2
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